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.