Analysing Layouts of Newspapers

First Newspaper

37cm

30cmThe first newspaper I’m going to look at is the Surrey Comet, this is one of our local newspapers.

The first thing I’m going to analyse will be the front cover. Here you can that it set out as a typical newspaper, the title of the newspaper is the biggest text. Then the picture is the second biggest item on the page, this is typical because usually a picture would attract the readers attention, also this relates to Gaulting and Ruge’s news value ‘Reference to Elite Persons’.

Also there is only five columns; two taken up by the image with the main story, two more of text for the main story and the last one is column of advertisements. Whereas on the inside of the paper there is six columns, this is because on the front cover the columns are slightly wider. I think this is because the front cover is there to attract the readers attention and only needs one big story, whereas on the inside there are more stories so therefore the columns are smaller.

Also at the bottom of the front cover there are smaller columns with brief descriptions of other news the paper contains.

First Newspaper Continued

The second thing I’m going to look at is one of the double page spreads, this page was the second page in the paper and has the main cover story as the main story on this page.

As you can see the front cover story takes up a large quantity of the page; the story has two columns with a small image, then the larger image takes up a further two columns. Unlike the front cover this inside page has six columns in total with images embedded in the text. The text is also smaller which means more stories can be fitted into one page. There are two smaller stories next to the main story which must be seen as less important than the David Walliam’s story.

Another point is that the stories in the top three quarters of this page are fairly good news’ David Walliam's raising money, lecturer designing logos for the Olympics and road works ending. Whereas once you get to the bottom quarter of the page there’s a story about online affairs which is bad news. Then there’s jewellery advertisement in the bottom right corner of the page. This is in the paper because it’s a local shop.

First Newspaper ContinuedThis is another double page spread but it’s further into the paper. As you can clearly see it’s set out different to the fist double page spread in the paper.

One thing that is the same is that there’s a dominant story. However unlike the first double page spread this story only takes up a quarter of the page. This could be because the main story on the double page spread was on a famous person which relates to Gaulting and Ruge’s news value ‘Reference to Elite Persons’, so therefore the story takes up a smaller amount of space because it’s about and ‘ordinary’ person. Another point about this story is that it bad news but it’s the biggest story on the page because the paper sees it as good news because the public want to read about things like this because it’s in their local area.

However the biggest image on this page doesn’t have a lot of text to describe the story behind it.

There are more advertisements on this page than there was on the first double page spread.