Journalism Now - The Daily Star and Radio 3

News Agenda Presentation – The Daily Star and BBC Radio 3

The Daily Star and Radio 3 are very different in their approaches to the news, a fact which is reflected in their vastly different target audiences.

The Daily Star was launched in 1978; from the start it was intended to be a 'lighter' take on news and its focus was, and still is, mainly on celebrities. This has worked out well for the Star, which achieves a circulation of 863,805 and a total adult readership of 1,648,000. The age of the newspaper seems to be in line with that of its target audience. Most readers are under 54 years of age and according to the Star's own demographic profile, it expects the audience to mainly be made up of 25 – 34 year olds. The majority of readers are male. It expects them to regard the paper primarily as entertainment, with news items slotted between colourful spreads depicting women in the most recent reality television programme. The Star's advertising rates are £97 for a colour display and £72 for a monochrome one.

The Star also expects the majority of its readers to be in full time employment and therefore have some disposable income. These advertisements tend to be video games (to appeal to the predominantly male readership), deals in 'downmarket' supermarkets (e.g. Aldi, Morrisons – to appeal the C2DE demographic) and package holidays (to appeal to those with young families.) In terms of language used, most sentences comprise monosyllabic words and colloquial terms, which suggests that the assumed reading age of the audience is low. It is sensationalistic and frequently employs the use of emotive terms where a more 'neutral' word could have worked, which links to the Star's primary motive of providing entertainment for its audience.

The average Daily Star reader prefers watching television over reading – this is highlighted in the graphology of the newspaper. There is a larger ratio of pictures to text, it is colourful and the font for headlines is big and striking. This style of presentation is effectively trying to emulate television, which its audience can relate to, and when paired with stories about people who regularly appear on the television it captures the attention of the reader.

Any serious news items that are included amongst celebrity news are dealt with in a manner that is consistent with every other tabloid. The tone of the paper could be described central-right – it won't hesitate to have headlines referring to 'asylum seekers' even if they only play a small part in the story. Political correctness is not really on the agenda for the Daily Star, but neither is it in the interest of its readers.

Radio 3 (formerly The Third Network) was launched in 1967, and attracts 2,145,000 listeners each week. It is aimed at an older audience. 57 is the average age of a listener, and they will listen to Radio 3 for about 6 hours each week. Their audience is not varied in age: there is a very small percentage of listeners that are 35 and under. Almost half of them are retired, and perhaps due to their age are more likely to own their own house than the average person. The split between male and female listeners is fairly even. There are no advertisements on BBC Radio 3 – this makes it difficult to estimate which social grade their audience could fit in to. The audience are discernible only by the service that Radio 3 offers – hours of classical music with some interviews, which would probably not appeal to C2DEs.

The news bulletin for Radio 3 is supplied by BBC News. The news provided is therefore regarded as politically 'centre' though some may argue that the BBC leans toward the left. The bulletin is always short, concise and never contains any 'celebrity gossip.' The news agenda is concerned largely with political, economical and world news. The BBC will only present the news in a way that is factual and impartial and will actively avoid using any emotive language. Political correctness is high on the agenda of the BBC as they are the national broadcaster for the United Kingdom and therefore have an extremely broad audience to cater for.

The bulletins will cover four of the top news stories of the day, usually with a specific news item of particular importance recurring throughout the week. The final item of the bulletin usually deviates slightly from the political/economical focus and instead be a story concerning medicine, conservation, environment or charity. There are no jingles or breaks between news items which suggests that Radio 3 assumes their listeners will stay tuned in for the duration of the bulletin and have a good attention span.

In many ways the audiences of the Daily Star and Radio 3 are polar opposites – while readers of the Star are young, interested in pop culture, male and politically right-leaning, listeners of Radio 3 are old, interested in 'higher' culture, evenly split in terms of gender and, if the presentation of the news is taken to reflect the opinions of the listener, slightly left-leaning.

References:

Radio 3 Audience research (2004) - http://www.adambowie.com/weblog/archive

The Daily Star Factbook (2009) http://images.dailystar-uk.co.uk/pdfs/DailyStarfactbook09.pdf

Radio 3 audience figures (2010) http://www.mediauk.com/radio/311/bbc-radio-3