Newspapers: Daily Mirror - Representation and Industry

Our final tasks for the Daily Mirror involve studying Representation and Industry.

Remember, this is an in-depth CSP and needs to be studied with reference to all four key concepts: Language, Representation, Industries and Audience.

Daily Mirror notes

Representation

The Daily Mirror supports the Labour Party and is against the Conservative Party. Generally, the newspaper will act as a voice for normal people and go against the rich and powerful (like Conservative politicians or 'greedy bankers').

You need to study the selected CSP pages for the Daily Mirror to see how the newspaper represents different people and groups.

Industries

The Daily Mirror is owned by Reach, which used to be called Trinity Mirror. Reach publishes over 240 regional titles in addition to the Daily Mirror and Sunday Mirror - including our local newspaper website getwestlondon.

The Daily Mirror's circulation has fallen drastically over the years from over 3 million a day in 1990 down to around 450,000 a day in 2020. Recent falls have been due to the rise of the internet which is why the Mirror's audience is much older now.

To combat falling print revenues, the The Daily Mirror has:

• Created the mirror.co.uk website and social media content such as the Daily Mirror Twitter feed.
• The move towards a multi-platform landscape means that it publishes and synchronises across its print, desktop and mobile platforms. The Daily Mirror provides this online content for free. Some newspapers (e.g. The Times) have a paywall on their online content which means that they charge subscription fees to read articles.  Free providers make money from advertising space online.
• Created a social media strategy in collaboration with the digital team to drive growth of their Twitter and Facebook profiles. 
• Create news based content that updates regularly, is shared on social media channels, includes a range of video content and encourages audience involvement. Printed newspapers cannot do this so effectively.

News values

Media theorists Galtung and Ruge defined a set of news values to explain how journalists and editors decided that certain stories and photographs were accepted as newsworthy, while others were not. The following list is adapted from their work:

• Immediacy: has it happened recently?
• Familiarity: is it culturally close to us in Britain?
• Amplitude: is it a big event or one which involves large numbers of people?
• Frequency: does the event happen fairly regularly?
• Unambiguity: is it clear and definite? 
• Predictability: did we expect it to happen?
• Surprise: is it a rare or unexpected event?
• Continuity: has this story already been defined as news?
• Elite nations and people: which country has the event happened in? Does the story concern well-known people?
• Negativity: Is it bad news? Bad news tends to get more focus as it’s more sensational/ attention grabbing. 
• Balance: the story may be selected to balance other news, such as a human survival story to balance a number of stories concerning death.

Blog tasks: Daily Mirror case study

Work through the following questions to complete your work on the Daily Mirror.

Representation

1) What political party does the Daily Mirror support?

2) How does the Daily Mirror usually represent rich and powerful people?

3) How are celebrities usually presented in tabloid newspapers like the Daily Mirror? Look at the 'New Bond stars are revealed' story on the front page of the Daily Mirror.

4) How are the royal family presented in the double-page spread 'Kate told Harry to make peace... then they all met up for tea'? 

5) Why do you think the Daily Mirror represents the royal family as a 'normal' family? Why might this appeal to Daily Mirror readers?


Industries

1) What company owns the Daily Mirror?

2) What is the Daily Mirror's circulation in 2020? How many papers did the Daily Mirror used to sell back in the 1990s?

3) Why has the newspaper industry struggled in the last 20 years?

4) How has the Daily Mirror reacted to the decline in print sales and the growth of the internet?

5) List five of Galtung & Ruge's News Values and explain how they link to the stories in our CSP edition of the Daily Mirror.


Grade 8/9 extension task

The Daily Mirror's owner, Reach (then Trinity Mirror) bought control of the Express and Daily Star newspapers in 2018. Read this Guardian feature on the deal. Why did Trinity Mirror buy the papers?

You will get some lesson time to work on this case study but will need to complete it at home - due date on Google Classroom.