nistor andreea eseu zdrenghea

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English tabloid: The Sun vs Romanian tabloid: Click! Introduction: The Sun is a daily tabloid newspaper published in the United Kingdom and Ireland. It was founded in 1964 as a successor broadsheet to the Daily Herald. It became a tabloid in 1969 after it was purchased by its current owners. 1 The tabloid had the largest circulation of any daily newspaper in the United Kingdom, but in late 2013 slipped to second largest Saturday newspaper. It had an average daily circulation of 2.2 million copies in March 2014. The Sun covers subjects such as: sports, TV & Showbiz and it also contains a video section in which you can find subjects ranging from what was the last thing that the Kardashian clan did or what is the latest discovery in the scientific field or maybe news regarding how a 57 year old male TV star paid a 13 year old girl for sex. The Sun tabloid can also be found on-line accessing the web page: www.thesun.co.uk . The first picture shows how the front 1 "The Sun (United Kingdom)." Wikipedia . Wikimedia Foundation, n.d. Web. 05 Jan. 2016.

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English vs Romanian tabloid

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Page 1: Nistor Andreea Eseu Zdrenghea

English tabloid: The Sun vs Romanian tabloid: Click!

Introduction:

The Sun is a daily tabloid newspaper published in the United Kingdom and Ireland. It was

founded in 1964 as a successor broadsheet to the Daily Herald. It became a tabloid in 1969 after

it was purchased by its current owners.1 The tabloid had the largest circulation of any daily

newspaper in the United Kingdom, but in late 2013 slipped to second largest Saturday

newspaper. It had an average daily circulation of 2.2 million copies in March 2014. The Sun

covers subjects such as: sports, TV & Showbiz and it also contains a video section in which you

can find subjects ranging from what was the last thing that the Kardashian clan did or what is the

latest discovery in the scientific field or maybe news regarding how a 57 year old male TV star

paid a 13 year old girl for sex.

The Sun tabloid can also be found on-line accessing the web page: www.thesun.co.uk .

The first picture shows how the front page of the newspaper looks and the following picture

illustrates how the home page of the on-line page appears to the readers.

1 "The Sun (United Kingdom)." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, n.d. Web. 05 Jan. 2016.

Page 2: Nistor Andreea Eseu Zdrenghea

Click! is a Romanian tabloid owned by “Adevărul Holding”. In the year 2009, Click! was

the best selling Romanian newspaper with 208.903 copies per edition. Just as in the case of The

Sun tabloid from England Click! is the successor of Averea. Averea was a general newspaper

from Romania, popular christian democratic orientated, with accent on the economical

information. It was founded in 2005, but in 2006 it repositioned itself as a tabloid, with an

agressive communication campaign. Subsequent, in Februray 2007, the newspaper changed its

name to Click!.

Click! tabloid offers topics such as: news, stars, sport, entertainment. There is also and

on-line form of the tabloid, not only a printed one. The following pictures illustrate how the two

sources look like.

When it comes to the comparison of the two tabloides first of all we can start with

comparing the founding date: The Sun was foundes in 1964, later becoming a tabloid in 1969,

whereas Click! was founded only in 2005 transitioning in 2006 to a tabloid. From this point of

view it is clear that The Sun has much more influene and acknowledgement in this field. If we

compare the sales of the two, it is obvious which tabloid is on the first line: The Sun. Click!

managed to be the best selling newspaper in Romania in 2009 with sales of 208.903 copies per

edition whereas The Sun has aproximately a daily circulation of 2.2 milion copies per month.

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Even though there is such a big discrepancy between the sales and the popularity of the

two tabloids, their aspect and topics are quite alike: TV stars, fashion models, sports and lots of

quotidian news and happenings. Despite the similarities of their choice of topics I consider there

is a quality difference regarding the content of the news, the quality in which the news are

written and also the level of explicit content showed in both pictures and the language used.

To continue with I will analyse the way in which the two tabloids approach certain

characteristics of their content: language, display, advertising, photographs, quality and

importance of their news, etc.

Language:

Both tabloids use pretty explicit language. Words such as: “sex” are quite common used.

From what I have read in order to complete this task, I found out that the Romanian tabloid uses

more strong words that the English tabloid: the word “sex” is much more used and words such as

“sexy”, “prostitute”, “whore”, “porno”, “rape”, “violence” are used. I consider that the Romanian

tabloid uses much more strong words than the English one. Also what I have noticed is that the

Romanian’s tabloid choice of topics is mostly influenced by topics such as: who slept with who,

a TV star has a baby with someone else than their spouse, which woman is the lover of a certain

football player, etc. whereas even though we can find this topics in the English tabloid, they are

not the dominant ones.

Regarding language the Romanian tabloid often chooses a misleading title for their

articles: many times it happened that I was attracted by a title saying: “Shock! Tragic death in the

life of x” but in fact the article was not about a person, but instead of a pet. I do not consider this

technique a good one because it misleads the readers.

The Sun tabloid was involved in a scandal in October 20132 regarding the title of their

main article on the front page. The title in question was “1.200 killed by mental patients”. The

2 The first picture.

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title suggests that mental patients killed 1,200 people. This title is misleading since when paying

close attention to the sub-title of the article you can read the following: “Shock 10-year toll

exposes care crisis”. Only after we read the sub-title and the article we are informed that those

killings mentioned in the title of the article are in a span of 10 years, they did not happen all at a

time, such as you can understand from the articles title. After this number of the tabloid was

launched two mental health charities: Mind and Rethink Mental Illness criticised the choice of

words that The Sun used on their front page. Not only people with mental illness are already

marginalised in society, the article contributed to the belief that mental patients are prone to

commit murders, this is what the critics had to say about the choice of words that The Sun used

on their cover.

Display

Regarding the display of the two tabloids I consider both The Sun and Click! use the same

techniques to attract readers. A bolded and catchy article title with an attention gathering picture,

such as the following:

The above pictures represent one article from The Sun and one from Click!. In both cases

we can identify a big bolded title, followed by a sub-title and a picture that captivates our

attention and makes us curious about what might have happened there.

Page 5: Nistor Andreea Eseu Zdrenghea

Photographs:

3

From my point of view the Romanian tabloid, Click!, is dominated by pictures that

illustrate women in provocative postures or even naked.

The English tabloid uses provocative pictures also, but in a lower number than the

Romanian one.

Both Romanian and English tabloids make use of explicit photos in their articles. In the

following pictures you can see a baby who has a rash infection after his mother gave him

3 Click!

Page 6: Nistor Andreea Eseu Zdrenghea

medication.

by students in the university campus. I consider images such as the one above should not

be the primary one in an article because children may have access to this newspapers or on-line

sites and this explicit content is not an appropriate one.

Content:

The following extract talks about how tabloids manage to interest us and how certain

classes of people are exemplified in their topics:

“Mass media gossip is interesting to many people, as evidenced by the proliferation of

gossip magazines and gossip television shows. Despite its popularity, there has been little

research into the evolutionary underpinnings of why gossip contains particular topics.

Furthermore, no one has provided input to those working in gossip-based media. Therefore, we

The following picture is

from the Romanian tabloid, and I

consider it is more explicit than the

first picture showed. During my

research I have not seen something

similar in the English tabloid. The

topic is about sexual activities done

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begin by defining and explaining mass media gossip using an evolutionary, biosocial

perspective. To demonstrate that the media workers may benefit from relying on knowledge of

evolved human nature in their work, we conducted a study. We examined the content of three

successful tabloids, using a list of evolutionary-based topics created a priori. The results indicate

that tabloids reflect fitness-relevant topics that were important throughout our evolutionary past.

The tabloids equally represent both sexes, and while they mostly concentrate on entertainers and

royalty, they do pay some attention to unknown individuals. By correlating who and what is

gossiped about, we found celebrities are more often the subjects of stories involving wealth,

while unknown individuals are almost always gossiped about within the context of life-

threatening events. We use our study to provide guidelines for those working in media, which

will hopefully enable their work to obtain maximum audience interest.”4

After reading the article I can understand that people are attracted to gossip, their desire

to know how rich people’s lives are is quite predominant, while not so known people are often

found in articles regarding crime, violence or some terrible accident.

Advertising:

When it comes to advertising we can find all sorts of topics: on-line matrimonial,

clothing advertising, etc. What I have seen is that the on-line page of the Romanian tabloid often

remembers the cookies from the search history of the browser and the advertising on the on-line

version of the newspaper often contains information from the sites I have visited previously.

This advertise is from the English tabloid, The Sun.

4 Fisher, Maryanne, and Charlotte De Backer. "Tabloids as Windows into Our Interpersonal Relationships: A Content Analysis of Mass Media Gossip from an Evolutionary Perspective." Researchgate.net. N.p., Jan. 2012. Web. 14 Jan. 2016.

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Conclusion;

To conclude with I consider that the English tabloid, The Sun, is much more structured

and contains a better content than the Romanian one, Click!. Also I can add the fact that the

Romanian tabloid uses more explicit pictures than the English one, which may harm if children

manage to read or look at the pictures inside the tabloid.

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1. "The Sun (United Kingdom)." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, n.d. Web. 25 Jan. 2016.

2. Fisher, Maryanne, and Charlotte De Backer. "Tabloids as Windows into Our Interpersonal

Relationships: A Content Analysis of Mass Media Gossip from an Evolutionary

Perspective." Researchgate.net. N.p., Jan. 2012. Web. 14 Jan. 2016.