Human Interest

Human interest

This term refers to stories and articles in newspapers that are designed specificaly to make the person reading it feel good and to gain their interest in a positive way. These types of stories are often covered in non-profit making media outlets like free newspapers. These types ofstories are also good as they leave the reader with a positive view of the newspaper that they have just read it in.

This is an example of a human interest story on The News' website: Opportunity could change young peoples lives. The story focuses on positive things happening for young people and works to defy common beliefs that young people are not the model citizens they could be.

Ethos

The disposition, character, or fundamental values peculiar to a specific person, people, culture, movement.

Ethos is very important to news organisations as it is the character of their media outlet. For example:The News focuses alot on children and what is happening for the younger generation in the Portsmouth area as you can see in this story from 1st October 2010: 'School cuts are set to damage my son's education'. This story clearly illustrates a caring and sensitive ethos held by the news and shows that they like to bring stories of disadvantage to light. If you compare the last story to this one from the Daily Mail website of the same date: BBC stars condemn politically biased union plans to black out next week's Tory conference. As you can see this story from the Daily Mail is written about a much more high profile case and features a story that has no real impact on normal people. This shows an ethos employed by the Daily Mail of bringing high profile information to people and has less space within its pages for stories about individual lower profile cases.

Inverted Triangle

The inverted triangle is a diagram showing how a news article should idealy be written. The most important information is contained in the top paragraph. This is the paragraph that is first read by the viewer. In order to maintain the readers interest they must have important and interesting facts delivered to them early on in order to keep them hooked. The middle of the triangle contains more interesting and important information about the story. The bottom and smallest part of the trianlge contains less important, peripheral information that can be cut by the editor if needs be to make the articla fit in the newspaper.

Pre-prodution: The News

The Portsmouth News

Areas of Circulation

The News divides itself into three areas of circulation. These are: The City, Havant and Waterlooville and Fareham and Gosport. In their media pack they say that this is done to insure that they can maximize the contents appeal to people within each area. For example a story about a new school opening in Portsmouth's inner city, for instance, would probably not interest someone who lived in Fareham as it would probably not affect them.

Audience

The News has a circulation of 48,191 (ABC January - June 2009) and a readership of 112,939 people (jicreg 01/10/2009). The News say that their audience reflects the local population so therefore takes its readership from a wide age range and do not specificaly target any particularly tight age range. They also say that 67% of adults read The News for information on events, jobs and attractions etc. The News' media pack also claims that the average reader spends 31 minutes reading an issue.

Click here; This is the media pack made by the Portsmouth news containing the facts and figures about circulation and areas of distribution etc.

Pre-Production: Local Newspaper

Newsworthiness

This is the word applied to how important and how deserving a particular story is of being covered within a piece of journalistic media such as a newspaper. This can also be subdivided into categories entitled; news values and bias.

News Values

This describes the level of prominence given to a certain story or type of story by different media outlets. This is particularly true for newspapers. The news worthiness values vary from paper to paper, for example tabloid newspapers will contain more coverage of stories involving celebrities for example whereas broadsheets such as the times will contain more political stories designed appeal to an older more middle class demographic compared to primary audience of tabloid newspapers such as the sun which have an audience more within the working class.

Bias

Bias within media outlets such as the news is often carried out in order to support particular political parties, leaders or ideologies. This means that when a media organisation is bias they will only run stories beneficial to the institution that they are tied with or support, they may also run other stories but will attempt to slant them in order to show their partner in a beneficial light.

Other types of bias normaly found within newspapers include:

• Corporate bias - The practice of using news to support the media corporation that owns that particular media outlet and using the news that is covered to improve peoples opinions of that corporation.
• Mainstream bias - This is the term used to describe the practice of only covering what other newspapers are covering at the same time and not running stories that are different from the ordinary at that time and may single out that particular media company as controversial.
• Sensationalism - This is when media outlets only cover high profile events and events that do not happen on a regular basis. When this is done regularly it starts to conceive the view that only big events like this happen and that these are the norm due to the lack of coverage of more expected day to day stories.

Local Newspaper

A local newspaper is a newspaper that applies its coverage to a small area such as a county or a city. These newspapers do not cover large scale national and international issues normaly unless they affect the audience within their distribution area and the area that they actually cover. These newspapers often have a smaller demographic than larger newspapers and appeal to a more specific middle aged group.