Newspaper activity

Aardra Biju

An activity was given to document the number of pages in a newspaper and to count the number of advertisements in them. The advertisements were also Categorised into government and private ads. We also had to find examples of attributions and 5W1H in the newspaper.

We went through three different newspapers and the outcome or the finding from these papers are –

1) Total no. of pages –
Newspaper A-9
Newspaper B-7
Newspaper C-11

2) Number of total adds ,gov ads & Private ads
Newspaper A – It has 9 ads in total with 0 government ads and 9 private ads
Newspaper B – It has 8ads in total with 2 being government and 6 private
Newspaper C -It has 11 ads in total with 2 being government and 9 private

3) Attribution – In a newspaper, attribution is the practice of giving credit to the source of information and to the people who are quoted. It’s important for a number of reasons, including:

Accountability: Journalists are showing where their information comes from.

Transparency: Reporting includes both the fact and how the journalist came to know it.

Reproducibility: Readers can independently follow up with the source

– We found some examples of this from all 3 newspaper

4) 5W1H – In journalism, the 5W1H framework is a set of questions that journalists use to gather and communicate information about a situation:
Who: Who was involved?
What: What happened?
Where: Where did it happen?
When: When did it happen?
Why: Why did it happen?
How: How did it happen?

We identified and marked these on the newspaper articles

We learned a bit more on the structure of the newspapers and how much research goes into it. How different newspapers have different advertisement policies,while some may have more government ads others may have more private ads. The type of ads also shows the ideology of the newspaper too.