Methodology

METHODOLOGY  

As my hypothesis is to discover whether ‘Broadsheet newspapers aim their newspapers at a different audience to tabloids’, I investigated the discourse structure and language of both types of newspaper. Over the 23^th and 25^th of July I collected 3 broadsheet titles on two days (The Guardian, The Times and I) and the same for tabloid newspapers (The Sun, Daily Mirror, Daily Star) with the main topic being the birth of the Royal Baby.

COMPARABILITY

I collected my data on the topic of the birth of the Royal baby, and the naming of him, allowing a two day gap between them. By doing so, this allowed me to analysis data on specific stories, allowing comparisons of language between to be far more valid.  I chose to use the broadsheets The Guardian and The Times as these were reported to be the extremely popular British quality newspaper titles (http://www.newspapers.co.uk/most-popular-uk-newspapers/), with more popular newspapers such as Daily Mail being mid-market. Using mid-market newspapers may reduce my level of comparability as it’s in between broadsheet and tabloid. I also chose The Sun and Daily Mirror as tabloid samples due to their popularity. For the broadsheet ‘I’ and tabloid ‘Daily Star’, I also used these for comparability between them as both of them are the cheapest newspaper under their categories,  to see if the language changes further, based on the price of the newspaper. To minimise comparability issues, I collected the same titled newspapers, on the same date, reporting the same story. This allowed my data the ability to be compared between one another without a lack of reliability. To improve comparability, when analysing the language of the lead report of the Royal Baby, I will only analysis the front page and first 2 pages reporting the story. By doing so, the data will be a similar sample size as particular newspaper report it over 8 pages, and others over 2 pages. I also chose to collect 3 titles of each broadsheet and tabloid to increase the representativeness of coming to conclusions of broadsheets and tabloid, based on the data.

RELIABILITY

One concern I faced in my investigation was the possibility of lacking reliability when analysing the newspapers, due to the newspapers only reporting a story for one day.  I overcame this problem by collecting similar stories over 2 days, resulting in a large data sample. This is likely to lead to far more representative data of the newspaper titles if language features are found in the same newspaper on separate dates. However, it can be argued that collecting two newspapers of each title not a large enough sample, making the data unrepresentative of how the newspaper titles usually write.

ETHIC Issues

As all the newspaper titles were published for the public to read, no ethical issues can exist when using data that consist only in the newspapers. This lead to no complications of the possible Hawthorne effect created from recording people’s behaviour and required no consent from applicants taking part in the data.