Lecture 9- Newspapers and Magazines

In our lecture on Newspapers and magazines we discussed how they have changed from the 19^th century, with no pictures, being very formal and mostly text. To the newspapers we have today which are described to be like ‘tv screens’, shrunk down in size, full of imagery and considered to some a commodity to everyday life.

An example of a newspaper that we looked at in the lecture was The Sun. Tabloid newspapers became very popular by making jokes, showing pictures and personalising their stories. However you can not believe everything that is printed in these papers. This is mainly because it has become their aim to entertain rather than just there to inform us of the news. For example, in 1833 the papers were known to be printing stories about how you could see aliens on the moon from a new telescope. However this was during the time where slavery was abolished in England and did not get covered by the papers. This form of entertainment meant that many stories involve a lot of celebrity gossips and mis-fortunes. They can also be very persuasive in telling us what is right and what is wrong, they do this by adapting a chatty tone and taking sides.

We also talked about how aware/unaware people can be to the papers misleading stories. People can be very cautious when reading papers or magazines of these sorts, sometimes people read the stories with ‘sceptical laughter, knowing the stories are over the top and laughing at how over exaggerated they are. 

You could say we have a type of commodity that creates a sense of identity, running stories on immigration and local events encourage people to understand a sense of belonging.  Due to the media Nationalism was created, as it was not around 200 years ago. This shows how important these papers are in showing us the world we live in. Now in modern times, there are other ways of checking the news and much faster ways of finding a story, and that is buy computer or mobile devices. This has lead in the drop of sales of papers and is slowly being replaced by technology. However the main question is do these text contain any meaning to them, do they make us think or are they just another everyday commodity we buy into?

-Rebecca Walters