The Paradise Papers Story coverage

Case study: News story coverage→The Paradise Papers...

More than 13 million leaked secret corporate files, about half of which belong to offshore law and corporate services provider Appleby, which has ten offices around the globe. There are also documents from corporate registries in 19 tax havens. These are mostly Caribbean and Atlantic islands such as Bermuda, Grenada and the Bahamas, but also include Malta, Lebanon, Labuan (an island territory in Malaysia), Samoa, Vanuatu, the Cook Island and the Marshall Island.

The German newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung obtained the files and shared them with 95 other media organisations around the world. But the German newspaper is not going to share the information about the source that gave them the files, as it is against the editorial code to share information about your sources. 

The files involve taxes about multinational countries, wealthy individuals, heads of state, politicians ad sports star from around the world, including many from the UK.

On Monday 6th November, the main headlines covered leaked documents revealing the financial details of the super-rich. It outlined how many were allowed to keep money outside of the UK in order to avoid paying tax.

The Guardian- political, economical, formal language, left-wing, passive news, socialist ideology, the newspaper is challenging the Queen's morals→ Berliner broadsheet→information seekers→masthead→splash→copy- formal mode of address

News Value→ SOCIALIST, POLITICAL, ECONOMICAL, FORMAL LANGUAGE 
                              ↔ANALYSING
Ideology→ SOCIALIST →PRO-CAPITALIST→MAINSTREAMED 

 The Guardian spent a number of days publishing a series of articles focusing on this 'Paradise Papers' story. The yellow colour linked all these front covers together. → this may have been done to make it shocking to the audience, because it gives more weight to the story.
Free press→freedom of speech- news given from a source. They can publish what they want because they own the newspaper.
PUBLIC INTEREST? ACCOUNT MORALISTIC                    

The Guardian- The use of negative language is important→ 'controversial'→ 'exploiting'- making the poor look stupid and worthless. This newspaper is being critical about the Queen. This newspaper is also making the Queen look like as if she took advantage of the people in Britain. The Queen is supposed to help people in Britain, but the newspaper suggests that she is taking money from the people who do not have it (exploiting). Not everyone in Britain is going to agree with what the Queen has done (controversial). The newspaper is also challenging the Queens morals.
Uses and gratifications→ the Guardian's audience is mostly upper/middle class readers. They might start questioning what the Queen has being doing.
The guardian uses entertainment through gaining information. For the people who are reading the newspaper, it suggests that the readers find the information entertaining
The yellow signifies something urgent→ such as big news. Bright, pure yellow is an attention getter, it is seen more quick than other colours, the colour yellow is spontaneous and unstable colour, because it is eye catching.

Socialist point of view→ the view of what the Queen did is bad→ the  newspaper uses a range of negative language. "exploiting"→"controversial"
The newspaper is challenging how the rich have ways of not paying their taxes, even though they have a lot of money, this make the rich look bad because of their actions. Rich = 'accused'. 

The Daily Mail- 'dragged'→ defending the Queen→right wing ideology→making the Queen come out as a victim. The daily mail are defending the Queen and making her look innocent to the public which is because they are a right wing paper, so the target audience is people who are right wing. 

The audience are interested in 'soft news' so they are interested in celebrities. The newspaper is all linked to economics e.g. school girl worth '£5m' and Queen dragged into '£10m' tax scandal. The 13 year old actress on the front cover, is represented as a pretty young girl that is clearly popular as she is on the red carpet. Even though she is the youngest female on the page, she is represented as confident and independent.

 The Queen is represented as vulnerable, this is suggested by the verb 'dragged' which suggests that one has no choice in the matter. This follows the stereotype of a woman who is typically represented as timid/vulnerable and weak. 

The model follows the Male Gaze Theory as she is presented as if she is taking her clothes off, with lots of skin on show, she is representing herself as a sexual object. Looking over her shoulder with a seductive expression. 

Media Language→ celebrity as main image, masthead-'newspaper of the year', minimal amount of splash, right wing ideology- headline, tabloid conventions, football pullout, section on pullout. The newspaper uses bright colours to draw people's attention.

Daily Mirror- left- winged tabloid→'scandal'→ making the Queen look critical. 

Daily Telegraph- objectivity (no ideology) → being old-fashioned about the way they way they write their newspapers. 

Independent- the main headline just tells us facts about the Paradise Papers, there is no ideology that is being used and is the newspaper headline is being objective.

Online News→ elements of how to share the story→ comments that people have written about the story, positive/negative? → the online newspapers will get people interacting and responding about the news story. This is good for the newspapers, as they will be getting a wide range of audience.


The rich should not be held to account for, because the government let what the rich did happen. They did not let people in Britain store money there, so the only thing the rich could do was keep in other countries.

Social Participatory Media

The Guardian- followers- 6.92M  tweets- 395k
Daily Mail- followers- 2.15M  tweets- 222k

The reason why the Guardian has more followers that the Daily Mail is because, it has more than 30 separate channels for different segments, such as sports and politics.  

Ownership and Regulations

WHO OWNS WHAT?

How many organisations own national newspapers and do any companies own more than one title?

•  There are 7 organisations that own national newspapers, 6 of the companies own more than one title. The titles that each company owns are all linked together, for example, Daily Mail and General Trust, own the Mail and Mail on Sunday. 

Which companies own regional newspapers? 

• The company that owns regional newspapers, such as, the Leicester Mercury, is the Trinity Mirror plc. The Trinity Mirror plc is the largest British newspaper, magazine and digital publisher, after purchasing rival Local World for £220 million, in October 2015. It publishes 240 regional papers, as well as the national Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror and People, and the Scottish Sunday Mail and Daily Record.

Ownership

The mail was originally a broadsheet, but it was then switched to a compact formal, in 1971. The paper has a circulation of around two million, which is the fourth largest circulation of any English language daily newspaper in the world. The Daily Mail, devised by Alfred Harmsworth (later Viscount Northcliffe) and his brother Harold (later Viscount Rothermere), was published on 4 May 1896. It was an immediate success. It was a cost halfpenny at a time when London dailies cost one penny, and was more populist in tone and more concise in its coverage than its rivals. The planned issue was 100,000 copies but the print run on the first day was 397,215 and additional printing facilities had to be acquired to sustain a circulation which rose to 500,000 in 1899. 



The Guardian, which was originally published as the Manchester Guardian, was founded in Manchester in 1821 by cotton merchant John Edward Taylor with backing from the Little Circle, a group of non-conformist businessmen. They launched their paper after the police closure of the one radicalManchester Observer, a paper that had championed the cause of the Peterloo Massacre protesters. The Guardian is part of the Guardian Media Group (GMG) of newspapers, radio stations and print media including; The Observer Sunday newspaper, the Guardian Weekly international newspaper, and new media—Guardian Abroad website, and guardian.co.uk. All aforementioned were owned by The Scott Trust, a charitable foundation existing between 1936 and 2008, which aimed to ensure the paper's editorial independence in perpetuity, maintaining its financial health to ensure it did not become vulnerable to take overs by for-profit media groups. At the beginning of October 2008, the Scott Trust's assets were transferred to a new limited company, The Scott Trust Limited, with the intention being that the original trust would be wound up. Dame Liz Forgan,  chair of the Scott Trust, reassured staff that the purposes of the new company remained the same as under the previous arrangements. 



The Sun is a tabloid newspaper published in the United Kingdom and Ireland. Since The Sun on Sunday was launched in February 2012, the paper has been a seven-day operation. As a broadcast, it was founded in 1964 as a successor to the Daily Herald; it became a tabloid in 1969 after it was purchased by its current owners. It was published by the News Group Newspapers division of News UK, itself a wholly owned subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. The Sun has the largest circulation of any daily newspaper in the United Kingdom, but in late 2013 slipped to second largest Saturday newspaper behind the Daily Mail. It had an average daily circulation of 2.2 million copies in March 2014. 

The Independent is a British online newspaper. Established in 1986 as an independent national morning newspaper published in London, it was controlled by Tony O'Reilly's Independent News and Media from 1997 until it was sold to Russian oligarch Alexander Lebedev in 2010. The last printed edition of The Independent was published Saturday 20 March 2016, leaving only its digital editions. Nicknamed the Indy. it began as a broadsheet, but changed to tabloid (compact) format in 2003. Until September 2011, the paper described itself on the banner at the top of every newspaper as "free from party political bias, free from proprietorial influences". It tends to take a pro-market stance on economic issues.

The impact of technological change on newspapers

Look at all of the UK news titles and research how the paywall is being used in an attempt to protect revenue and profits for these companies.

• All the online newspapers add a lot of different articles for people to read. They add things such as celebrities, sport and politics. They also add a range of images so that the readers are more drawn to the articles. By them having these articles online, they would make people want to buy the printed version as well. 

How do newspapers prompt readers to interact with their online news? Consider how they use social media to encourage reader participation.

• The media can influence people to read the newspaper online, such as on Twitter, Snapchat and Facebook. They do this by putting headlines that will catch people's eyes. With Facebook, people can share newspapers articles, so that all of the people that follow them can see it, and then some of those people might be intrigued with the article. 

Consider how you could apply Shirky's End of Audience Theories to online news products. 

• The content that is put into the news articles on the online news, can have an emotional connection to the reader. The news provide a platform for people to provide value for the readers.