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.