Codes and Conventions of The Sun and The Times

The Times Newspaper and the Sun have very different readerships and this supported by the way the front covers of both magazines are produced. For example the Times uses a lot more text whereas the Sun focuses mainly on smaller text and more pictures.

Here we can see the Sun's front cover, and as I said before there is very little text and it is mainly made up of pictures of celebrities.  The sun tends to use less formal language to appeal to its target audience, which is again why there is very little text, this is because they are appealing to its target audience who are more likely to want to read their stories if they see photo's of people they are interested about. This means they use little text because it would be a waste of their time and would not grab their target audience's attention. The sun's stories are usually less formal as well and they do not cover what I would call hard news they mainly focus on soft news, but again they have to do this in order to appeal to their target audience.

Here we can see the front cover of the times newspaper which is very different to that of the Suns front cover. This has a lot more text and is the layout is very different. This is different because its demographic is A-C1 and this is what they like to see on the newspapers they read. It is also different to that of the suns because it focuses on hard news, For example the main image on the cover is of Hilary Clinton and the heading next to her is to do with politics. The font used in this newspaper is very formal and easy to read, this is because there is so much text that using a fancy font would make it difficult to read and therefore defeat the purpose of having so much text. The masthead of the Newspaper is very simple because it is not the main reason for the newspaper to sell, however it is effective because its is bold and you can really notice it when looking at the front cover.

To the left is a story I have chosen from the suns Newspaper, and as you can see there is again very little writing compared to that of a story which is produced in the times. The majority of the paper is filled up with a picture because that is what people would be most interested in. The language used is not very formal but this is what we would expect from the Sun as it has grown a reputation of being an informal newspaper. This is noticeable by the header "Kick up the Arsenal". There is very little room for text because of how big the key image is but this fits in with the readership and demographic of the target audience. You can grasp the story without even really reading any of the text because of just the heading and the photo, which is the case with most of the stories they sun provide.

As you can see to the right of this text I have chosen a story which is similar to the one from the Sun. We can clearly see that there is a lot more text than that of the Suns story, this is because those people who read this newspaper like to read into greater depth about the stories they are reading and do not focus predominantly on pictures to tell the story. As we can see the key image is still very big but they have surrounded it with text so it does not overpower the whole story. The times focuses mainly on the text in order to tell the story which is why there is so much of it, this is because it is what they believe works with their target audience.

Moodboards

My own design of front cover's of newspapers/magazines

Task 1: Define the Target Audience for The Sun and The Times

The Times Newspaper
The Times has one of the largest readerships when it comes to newspapers from across the UK, this is approximately 1,128,000 people. The audience read the newspaper on different platforms ranging from PC and Hard copies, those who are more likely to read on a electronic device would be considered younger than those who may buy a hard copy. Overall The Times has 37,000 people who read their newspaper via their electronic devices, whereas they have 1,093,000 people who read it via the hard copy of the newspaper, this is in relation to the main audience being at the age of 65 or older. If we looked at the social demographic of 
The Times newspaper we can clearly see that they target those in the AB section, who are also known as upper-middle class. The example of The Times on the right hand side shows the different types of codes and conventions that The Times newspaper follows. For example The masthead is at the top of the page, it is bold black writing so that it stands out and is easily recognizable to the target audience. The font of the masthead also allows us to identify the readership of The Times because it is a very simple font which to me connotes the meaning of the people that read this newspaper are focused mainly on the stories and not whether it looks pretty and colorful. This to me proves The Times is a formal newspaper. 

From this front page we can clearly see that the readership are likely to have an interest in politics and international politics. This is because they have used an image of Hilary Clinton who is an American politician. This to me again proves that those who read The Times are focused mainly on the important issues surrounding this world rather than those who read The Sun newspaper who prefer the more gossipy type of articles. The Times front page uses a lot of text which to me again says that those reading it do not want to just see photos they want to read the full details of what is going on and be as informed as they can be, this to me says that the higher class citizens are most likely to read this type of newspaper.

The Sun Newspaper
The Sun has a much larger readership than the times of approximately 4,461,000 people. The Sun produces around 1,696,685 papers and then these produce a readership of around 4,315,000 people. The Sun has a much smaller readership online than The Times newspaper this number is around 160,000. The social Demographic of the Sun's readership is DE which are typically lower class and retired people. They target this audience because it works for them and has done for a number of years, I also believe they target this audience because it is very big audience so lowers the risk of failure.


The image to the right gives us an example of The Sun's front cover. It also allows us to identify the codes and conventions The Sun uses. For example if we look at the masthead like we did with The Times we can see that it is a lot simpler and has more color to it. The red background allows us to identify The Sun as a tabloid newspaper which means it's articles are based on soft news which differs to that of The Times. 

The front cover is very different to that of The Times as it is mainly dominated by images, and has very little text. This is because the audience who read The Sun like this and are used to it, This differs to that of The Times as the front cover of that newspaper was mainly dominated by text. The Sun use mainly pictures as the audience they are targeting like to understand a story purely by the pictures that have been used with a small bit of text to give some detail.


Overall we can tell that The Sun has a much larger readership than The Times and this is proven in the figures I have provided. One reason this might be the case is because The Sun is a newspaper that is more interested in the lives of celebrities and there gossip rather than the actual world events. This means they will have a larger audience because people enjoy being nosy and finding out about what they're most loved celebrities have been up too. This means there is also a much larger audience for them to target rather than The Times which shows why the readership is much greater.