Comparison of Serious and Tabloid Press

Capitalism is survival of the fittest. Those that are able to adapt, stay alive. Those who are not, die, financially of course. The first law of capitalism states: the consumer is our master. Whatever the readers wish for, the newspaper must do. There is no category of a consumer called "every one". That is why newspapers specialize themselves to target different customer groups. In the UK, one can distinguish two basics types of media: "serious" and "sensational". I will summarize the form and content of both using the examples of newspapers.

Newspapers that fall into the "sensational" media category are popularly called "tabloids". The customer group of destination in this case are people usually not well educated. They recruit from mostly from lower classes - physical workers, simple sitting jobs and so on. However, to my surprise, there seems to be a considerably large group of readers that fall into the upper class, not to mention middle-class. The only rational reason for such a phenomena that comes into my mind would be the simple fact that people need something to rest their brains on. No heavy topics, no sophisticated vocabulary, just reading for fun. Granted of course that you find tabloids entertaining.

What a person sees at first when looking at a front-page of a tabloid daily is the domination of pictures of text. Words take up only about one third of the area. On top of that the majority of the text is devoted to huge headlines.

Speaking of headlines, the ones in tabloids are infested with word play and usually related to scandalizing, macabre or humorous topic. Well over a half of articles is devoted to human interest. The ones left to politics usually relate to scandals, blunders, and so on.

The language used is casual. The large number of colloquialisms and phrasal verbs might even pose a problem for a non-native speaker, who is often

used to more sophisticated vocabulary and structure. An interesting habit of tabloid editors is sprinkling sophisticated, "smart" terms throughout the text. Those phrases are generally inserted in a way that would enable the reader to instantly guess their correct meaning.

On the other side of the scale we have the "serious" papers, or broadsheets. They are mostly targeted at people of higher education, having better-paid jobs. The process opposite to the one