Theory of my newspaper

Theory

Reception theory

The way audience create meaning of a media text. No single text has a single meaning. For example, this theory suggests individual members of an audience create their own meaning of a news story in a newspaper according to their class, age, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, culture, religion, disability and socio-economic and time of society.

In Morley’s study of an audience with many social groups reading the same media text, discovered three main types of reading for any media text;

-          Dominant reading  - the reader excepts the values, attitudes, beliefs and assumptions that the newspaper conveys

-          Negotiated reading – the reader partly accepts the message of the newspaper but brings their own reflection according to their position and interests.

-          Oppositional reading - the reader rejects the message of the newspaper bringing in their own interpretation of the news story for example.

Use and gratifications

What use audiences make of the media. Different audiences make use of different media texts. McQuail suggests an example of use and gratifications.

-          Information (advice, general interest and relevance to certain events, etc)

-          Learning (self-education, knowledge, etc)

-          Personal identity (identifying with celebrities, personal values, comparison to oneself, etc)

-          Integration and social interaction (circumstances of others, identifying with others, connection to social roles and connection to society, friends and family, a basis of conversation, etc)

-          Entertainment – (escaping from problems, relaxing, filling time, emotional release, sexual arousal, etc)

Narrative theory – Todorov

Suggested 5 stages to a narrative;

-          Equilibrium (even though news stories starts with dis-equilibrium)

-          A disruption of this equilibrium by an event (news stories start with this to create a dramatic and engaging affect on the audience and brakes the text)

-          A realisation that a disruption has happened

-          An attempt to repair the damage of this disruption

-          A restoration of equilibrium (new equilibrium)

Representation and regulation

Representation and stereotypes are very closely linked. A stereotype is a standardised representation of a specific group of people or objects or of a culture or subgroup. They are direct of beliefs and values. A stereotype is a valuable tool in popular culture (tabloid press) as it opens the ideologies within a text.

-          Simplistic – a stereotypical representation does not follow depth

-          Secondhand – people absorb stereotypes from their cultural context

-          Sometimes false – claims common qualities within a group which may not be true

-          A newspaper may deliberately try a change of opinion (reject government for example) according to its ideology and institution  

News values – Galtung and Ruge

-          Frequency (the time span of the event)

-          Threshold (how big the event is and is it big enough to make it into the news)

-          Unambiguity (is the meaning of the event clear)

-          Meaningfulness (how meaningful is the news story in the newspaper)

-          Consonance (how it can match with audience expectations)

-          Unexpectedness (if an event is unpredictable, rare, random, etc will have a more likely chance of being in the newspaper)

-          Continuity (the continuing  or follow through of the event)

-          Composition (usually depends on target audience of the newspaper as the gatekeepers influence a news story according to its ideology and institution)

-          Reference to elite nations (those nations which are culturally closest to our own will receive most of the coverage)

-          Reference to elite people (newspapers usually pay attention to important people, especially in the case of celebrities and tabloids)

-          Personalisation (how an individual member of the audience interpret the event)

-          Negativity (bad news is good news in terms of what is reported e.g. news story on stabbing)

Gatekeeping

Primary editors of a newspaper are responsible for selecting and ordering whether a news story is fit enough to be selected in a newspaper. Because newspaper space is limited, a story selected will depend on factors of news values, ideology and audience requirements (in my case, what stories do I think should be selected in my local newspaper).