News Agenda Written Analysis

The term ‘News Agenda’ is what the news is, and where it comes from. It’s a form of deconstructing the complexity of news, and analysing it piece by piece to gain a further and more detailed understanding of how news works. As a topic, news agenda also reveals the audiences and their relationship with journalists, and the age and gender of the readers of the newspaper.

Journalists have a love-hate relationship with audiences, yet they also respect the audience by making the news interesting and factual for them to read. The journalists may talk about their readers, because nowadays there are more opportunities to know who your audience is, mainly because they pay the wages. Newspapers and radio stations claim that it is tough to find an audience, but tougher to keep it due to their constant reading, and craving for fresher and more influential news. Within the news agenda, we discussed the social grading of the general public. ABC1’s deemed to be more upper middle class to lower middle class people, whereas the C2DE’s were people within the working class or on the lowest levels of subsistence.

The Independent, published in 1986 and produced by ‘Newspaper Publishing’ was created with the advertising slogan “It is. Are you?” in order to compete with the Guardian for centre and left wing readers, but also to battle The Times as a newspaper. Its main audience centres on the age band of 25-44 year olds, with 55 per cent of all ages being male readers. The source for this information can be found on the NMA Facts and Figures website for The Independent’s rate card [1]. The audience for the Independent is more within the middle class, professional people in administrative and even managerial employment.
The Independent favours to support Labour, or the left wing party as opposed to the Conservatives in the political battle for leadership, however when founded, the creators of the broadsheet at first intended to compete with The Daily Telegraph and The Times for their audience. Yet, nowadays it is seen as a left-wing newspaper fighting with The Guardian, even though it still has pro-conservative writers within the paper. The Independent also seems to take a tough stance against war stories, after rejecting the idea to go to war in Iraq, along with being against the Israeli “war crimes”. Evidence of their anti-war reporting is in The Independent back on the 7th November, where a report written by Richard Garner was headlined, “Casualties of war: how forces children bear scars of conflict”. Furthermore, the paper is well known for its positivity to the environment, evidence of this being various reports and news stories on environmental situations, not just in the United Kingdom, but worldwide.

BBC Radio Two news bulletins are usually heard throughout the Jeremy Vine and Sarah Kennedy shows, and despite being a BBC broadcast, the news on BBC Radio Two is not necessarily the same as news on, for example, BBC Radio Four. The radio station seems very sympathetic to its audience, for example, this week is the BBC Radio Two ‘Living with Dementia Campaign’ which is inviting dementia sufferers or relatives of dementia sufferers to come on the show and express their experiences of dementia, so I believe that the radio station as a whole looks to have a close relationship with its listeners. As for the news bulletins, they seem to be short and quite informative. To the point, but not too brief, because they have just the right about of information the reader needs and wants to know. As an example, today, 24th November on the Jeremy Vine show there was a news bulletin about a woman who escaped from a Kent prison, so the BBC used the news source of the police to obtain a press conference revealing any further information about the woman who had escaped. The news which is released seems to be brief on political news, and more aimed at entertainment news. On the 24th there was a brief mention on the Iraq war, yet there was a longer bulletin to reveal the release of Susan Boyle’s debut album. Despite the bulletins being short, it is the people like Jeremy Vine and Sarah Kennedy who take pieces of news, or facts of general information and analyse it to a point which interests the audience in a sympathetic, yet informative way. The audience for BBC Radio Two would be more to targeting the lower middle class population and possibly even skilled working classes to a minimum, because of their discussions on entertainment and news releases on sport. The age of their audience would be young because it covers a general variation of topics which teenagers to young adults would have a keen interest in, and I would expect the male-female ratio of listeners to be reasonably even because of the bulletin’s short and varied information being revealed. A source I found shows what actually happens in the BBC newsroom, and even refers briefly to the headlines of BBC Radio Two [2].

1-http://www.nmauk.co.uk/nma/do/live/factsAndFigures?newspaperID=13

2-http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/radio_newsroom/1061891.stm#the%20Radio%20Newsroom

OTHER SOURCES USED
• www.google.co.uk
• www.independent.co.uk
• http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00nz7jq/Jeremy_Vine_24_11_2009/