The audience for the newspaper is the general public of the 1960's. By nature, a newspaper is an article that is written to inform the public in a general, unbiased manner. Because of this newspaper editors and writers often write their columns in a manner that appeals to everyone and not just one specific audience. The title in it of itself lacks a lot of emotion, it is made to be strictly informative as it reads "President Signs Rights Bill Into Law." The headline is brief and straight to the point as not a single word is meant to add excitement to the title. Many modern day articles do have very descriptive and interesting headlines as to grab the reader's attention off of a quick glance, but for this article you must take the time period into consideration. In the 1960's television was just starting to catch its stride and it was not nearly as big as it is now, so many people did not even own televisions so they had to get their news from newspapers. Now, many households have a television so newspaper have become less valuable and their purpose has therefore shifted from informative to entertaining, and their headlines have changed accordingly.
You give a good explanation of the importance of the newspaper's characteristics for the audience. However, maybe saying who the audience is more specifically would assist your analysis. The public is too general, perhaps examining the people who bought news papers or got them delivered at the time would help. Maybe even identifying an age group because young kids probably weren't reading the newspaper.
ReplyDeleteI do agree with your point on how the newspapers were meant to inform people; however, I don't believe they were necessarily meant to be unbiased. Most media outlets sway one way or another on the ways they display certain views.
ReplyDeleteI agree with the point you made at the end about how the importance of newspaper in modern day is dwindling and how the purpose of them has changed. However, like Hailla said in her comment, I do not believe that newspapers are necessarily written from an unbiased standpoint. I feel that many articles are intended to be persuasive, rather than just informative.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you that the audience is the general public, but I feel like you could have expanded on which age group or people the article was actually reaching. For example, a post about cuddly pandas may be intended for the general public but the audience that reads it might only be panda activists. So perhaps your article reached a narrower audience than its intent? Overall, i think you did a great job portraying the audience of the paper.
ReplyDeleteI think you were right in saying that the audience is the general public and don't feel you really need to go more in depth than what you said because even though most kids may not read the newspaper, it doesn't mean that none of them did. I do disagree with the point about newspapers being unbiased though. Maybe it was different back then but I know that if you turned on CNN and FOX news today, even if they were talking about the same story you would get very different information form the two sources because of their bias.
ReplyDelete^That was me btw
DeleteI think that having a broader audience in the 1960's was key for the newspaper's impact. Today's metaphorical newspaper is social media, which is more efficient and quicker thanks to accessibility. As a result, however, people have an easier way of getting their opinions out in the open, creating a facade and lack of credibility behind the articles. Therefore, I feel as though newspapers have a more reliable article and the audience is given a fair argument.
ReplyDeletePeter
DeleteI agree with Peter (and all of you!) that we need to think about how modes have changed. Perhaps we live in an era where reporting is quite different from the 1960s. Reading the article, considering what paper it was, who it cites, etc., might give us a more detailed picture of its bias or audience-level intentions!
ReplyDelete