Compare a tabloid and a broadsheet newspaper.
Tabloids: eg Sun, Mirror, Daily Express, Daily Mail.
Broadsheets: eg Independent, Times, Guardian
 

1. You can either lay a large sheet of thin paper over the front of your newspapers and trace them, or work on a photocopy.
2. Draw around the outline of the page.
3. Now draw boxes around
   a The masthead (the block which tells you the name of the paper)
   b The main news story
   c The second news story
   d Plugs (information about what's inside the paper, or promotions)
   e Advertisements
4. What shape are the boxes you have drawn?
5. Measure the boxes containing the main story and the second story (including the headline and any pictures).
6. Work out the area each of them take up.
7. Now work out how many times the main story is bigger than the second story.
8. Do the news stories look different from the other items on the page? How?
9. Some of the type on the page will be in serif type, while other type will be in sans-serif.
10. Use coloured pens to highlight serif type in one colour, and sans-serif type in another colour. Which text is serif type used for? What about sans-serif type?
11. Are the headlines in all capital letters (upper case), or a mixture of upper and lower case?
12. Measure the height of a capital letter in the main headline.
13. Apart from size, what else makes the headline stand out?
14. Measure the sizes of the two largest pictures on the page. How many times is the largest bigger than the second largest?
    

Now, compare the results for the tabloid and the broadsheet.

What do your results tell you about the newspaper and the type of people it is aimed at?  

© 2001 Media Education Wales