Tabloids and the Mail

After reading Professor Peter Cole’s articles about newspapers in the UK I found out many things I didn’t know about newspapers, especially the Daily Mail. The Daily Mail has had the same owners for the past 100 years, which Cole attributes, partly, to its success because the paper has had the same underlying morals and ethics for such a long time its readers know exactly what to expect. 

Knowing your audience is an important for newspapers and Cole highlights the Mail’s knowledge of their target audience as another reason why is it the second most successful daily paper in the UK: “It comes down to confidence, the Mail's dominant quality. It knows it knows its audience. This is often described as "middle England" and predominantly it votes Conservative.”  The Mail knows exactly who their audience is, AB, C1, C2 and predominately women, and provides them with relevant news every day. 

Some people, including myself, don’t read the Mail because of its very Conservative viewpoint, for example in the news today the Mail featured a story about how children from divorced families are more likely to commit a crime. Whereas the Guardian’s headline today focused on Barak Obama’s recent speech and difficulties in the current elections, this just shows how the Mail is focused to suit its target audience who are more concerned with immigration and family values than world politics. This video is just a funny song about the types of sensationalised stories that can be found in the Daily Mail : The Daily Mail song. 

 

Obviously these are sensationalised versions of what is actually printed in the Daily Mail but are the type of stories which feature frequently on the cover. Cole summarises the viewpoint of the Mail quite nicely is his first article: “Those Mail views can be characterised thus: for Britain and against Europe; against welfare (and what it describes as welfare scroungers) and for standing on your own feet; more concerned with punishment than the causes of crime; against public ownership and for the private sector; against liberal values and for traditional values, particularly marriage and family life. It puts achievement above equality of opportunity and self-reliance above dependence.”

Cole comments on the skills it takes to be a tabloid journalist in his second articles one the Guardian’s website although they aren’t as trusted as broadsheet journalists because of certain incidents, for example the recent News of the World’s illegal phone tapping. Cole said that this is a shame because “Some of the best journalists work for tabloids and the techniques of tabloid journalism are the hardest to acquire.” The decline is sales of tabloids can be attributed to the “Big Brother news”, as Cole calls it, especially in the Star which has lost a vast majority of its readers. 

Even the Sun, the UK’s largest selling daily, has lost about 800,000 readers since 1987, Cole attributes this loss partly to the age of the Sun’s audience. As the readers have gotten older they have stopped reading the Sun and are likely to start reading a broadsheet or the Daily Mail once they reach 35. Cole said “the emphasis on sex and semi-explicit pictures makes them less likely to survive the settling down life stage” and that a father would not want to expose his children to the Star or Sun.