INTERVIEWERCould you tell us, Andrew,is there still a difference between the
tabloid newspapers and the so-called quality press in Britain?
ANDREW Oh yeah, there's a huge difference. I mean, physically you'll see the dif
ference straightaway because a tabloid paper is smaller, the so-called quality press,
otherwise known as broadsheets or the heavies, have, up to now tended to be bigger.
Recently, because of the problems people have had, say on trains, on buses, opening newspapers that are too big, they've become smaller. The Times, for example, has gone into a tabloid format but the tone of the paper hasn't changed - they still use more serious language, they still use smaller headlines, they still present the news in a more sober kind of fashion. Whereas, a tabloid newspaper tends to shout at you a bit more, tends to direct your eyes more across the page, huge pictures, huge headlines - it tells you what to think and how to react. Also, the tabloid papers tend to have a much bigger circulation - they sell in the millions whereas the broadsheets sell in the hundreds of thousands, and that’s a sort of reflection of the kind of, the way society breaks up, you know - of the way society is constructed. The more intellectual end of the newspaper market, would, they maybe sell between 3-, 400,000 and 800,000 and the biggest selling papers sell about 3 million, and they're the furthest downmarket.
I Can you tell us, Andrew, what kind of stories really sell newspapers?
AWell, it depends what newspaper you're talking about, you have to - as a journalist - thinkabout who's reading your paper when you're deciding how to prioritise your stories. The broadsheet newspapers tend to focus on the more serious stories - political stories especially are a great favourite for them to lead on. If you go right to the other end of the market with the downmarket, so-called red-top tabloids, they like TV stories, they like stories about film stars, they like stories about royals, they like crime stories, something with a much, sort of brasher, instant appeal. Our newspaper, the paper I work for, is somewhere in the middle of the market, so sometimes we’ll splash - the splash is the main story on the front page, it's a term that journalists use - sometimes we'll decide that the splash should be a political story, sometimes a crime story. We like family stories, we like stories that relate to the kind of people that are buying our paper, the middle-class families that we think are at the heart of our circulation.
INTERVIEWERClearly, the stories in different sorts of newspaper are written in different ways. Could you explain to us how the journalists know what kind of language to use?
ANDREW As I mentioned earlier, the pictures are bigger, the headlines are bigger. But what you find when you get to read the actual story is that the language in a tabloid newspaper tends to be snappier, shorter words, shorter crisper sentences, what we call a sort of “crash bang wallop” style, a sort of a straight to the point without any elaboration, without any flamboyant sentences, without words that are too long. Most paragraphs - if you look at a tabloid newspaper - most paragraphs are
about 20 words, very few paragraphs are longer than 30, and some are as short as about 10. It means the story is easier to read, it has a faster pace, it's more in tune with the kind of audience, with the kind of readership that the paper has. And if you see, if you read a story from a heavy paper, the paragraphs will be much longer to look at on the page and much harder work to get through. So, that’s a really discernible difference.
INTERVIEWER Could you describe for us the process of deciding on the story for the front page of a newspaper?
ANDREW Yes, I mean, this is probably the most exciting part of the job, deciding what the best story of the day is and how to present it. Every reporter wants to get his or her story on the front page, so they'll be trying their hardest to convince the news editor of the paper that theirs is the best story and that's where it should go. So, reporters are trying their best to get everything they can out of a story to write it in the most exciting and accessible way and then the news editor himself will try to convince the editor that that's where the story should go.
I Thank you very much Andrew.