...without stating the obvious really
Magazines are very informal and have lots of pictures. Especially those like Fashion and Pop Culture magazine Remix. There’s a section in it about Kiwi Icons and yes, because they are only short articles, it’s as I expected – not many facts.
In my opinion most magazine writing isn’t based on fact. It’s all about the opinion of a certain person. Whether it be a celebrity or the person writing it. And lots of people can interpret it differently. I remember when I was at school and we had to evaluate and analyse books. Everyone in the class had different opinions about what each section meant. It didn’t make everyone wrong and only one person right. It just meant that there were lots of different ideas and thoughts that go into writing a magazine article.
They have to try and capture the audience, depending on who their target audience are. It will vary from magazine to magazine but the main point is that facts aren’t a huge factor in this type of writing. It’s very casually and doesn’t seem to use any type of structure. The only structure they use is to make sure the opening paragraph pulls the audience in.
News articles use the same structure for their opening paragraph. They have to draw the attention of the reader. Mostly they can do this by using catchy headlines. Most, if not all news articles are based on fact. They so this to make sure the story is credible. No-one wants to read a story in the newspaper where the facts and figures are just made up.
Newspapers like The New Zealand Herald use the inverted pyramid structure to write their articles. This is so that all the important facts are at the top and if the reader loses interest then they should get everything they need out of the article by only reading halfway down it. That and also if it’s too long, then the editor just cuts off the bottom.
News articles only have a maybe one picture. Where magazines have lots of pictures that overlay each other, news articles will tend to have one picture to sum up the story. The Herald Online has the picture at the left hand side at the top of the article and maybe another one further down but newspapers let the words tell the story and not the pictures.
Magazines are very informal and have lots of pictures. Especially those like Fashion and Pop Culture magazine Remix. There’s a section in it about Kiwi Icons and yes, because they are only short articles, it’s as I expected – not many facts.
In my opinion most magazine writing isn’t based on fact. It’s all about the opinion of a certain person. Whether it be a celebrity or the person writing it. And lots of people can interpret it differently. I remember when I was at school and we had to evaluate and analyse books. Everyone in the class had different opinions about what each section meant. It didn’t make everyone wrong and only one person right. It just meant that there were lots of different ideas and thoughts that go into writing a magazine article.
They have to try and capture the audience, depending on who their target audience are. It will vary from magazine to magazine but the main point is that facts aren’t a huge factor in this type of writing. It’s very casually and doesn’t seem to use any type of structure. The only structure they use is to make sure the opening paragraph pulls the audience in.
News articles use the same structure for their opening paragraph. They have to draw the attention of the reader. Mostly they can do this by using catchy headlines. Most, if not all news articles are based on fact. They so this to make sure the story is credible. No-one wants to read a story in the newspaper where the facts and figures are just made up.
Newspapers like The New Zealand Herald use the inverted pyramid structure to write their articles. This is so that all the important facts are at the top and if the reader loses interest then they should get everything they need out of the article by only reading halfway down it. That and also if it’s too long, then the editor just cuts off the bottom.
News articles only have a maybe one picture. Where magazines have lots of pictures that overlay each other, news articles will tend to have one picture to sum up the story. The Herald Online has the picture at the left hand side at the top of the article and maybe another one further down but newspapers let the words tell the story and not the pictures.
1 Comment
Comparing the magazine “Rip It Up” to the New Zealand Herald, was an interesting find. I never knew there was such a difference between the writing styles of magazines and newspapers. I thought that journalists wrote in their own style, as long as the spelling and grammar were correct.
The topics in Rip It Up were mostly about music and musicians. People were the focus in most articles, with the different personalities often being the angle of the story. The journalists write with much opinion, colloquial language and jargon. With this particular magazine, there was swearing and a very informal way of writing. The sentences were mostly long and very descriptive.
The images really caught my eye, they were obviously edited and large in size. The articles on average were about a page, the main story was three pages. Alliteration is used in titles to catch attention, such as “Prince of Paranoia”, referring to Ozzy Osbourne. This title isn’t likely to be seen in a newspaper but it is acceptable in this magazine. There was also alliteration used within the article.
A few articles were written in an interview style, which I did not see in the New Zealand Herald. There were quite a number of long quotes in the magazine articles. Advertising consisted of CD releases as well as movie releases. In summary, Rip It Up’s articles were mostly based on opinion, the opinion of the writer clearly came through in all the articles.
The New Zealand Herald was purely based on facts. The newspaper came across as professional and a very formal way of writing, compared to the magazine. The images in the newspaper were real life images; they were not edited simply to catch your attention but rather reflected a person or place for what it was.
Advertising in the newspaper was on a wide variety of products and services, air flights, cars on sale and what different banks had to offer. The newspaper was split into different topics and this was clear by the headings.
The titles were straight forward and they seemed to give the reader some indication of what the article was going to be about, such as “Police refer toddler’s death to coroner”. Whereas, the magazines titles seemed to have one aim and that was to catch your attention.
The audience clearly determines the editorial content, as well as the writing style of any newspaper or magazine article.
The topics in Rip It Up were mostly about music and musicians. People were the focus in most articles, with the different personalities often being the angle of the story. The journalists write with much opinion, colloquial language and jargon. With this particular magazine, there was swearing and a very informal way of writing. The sentences were mostly long and very descriptive.
The images really caught my eye, they were obviously edited and large in size. The articles on average were about a page, the main story was three pages. Alliteration is used in titles to catch attention, such as “Prince of Paranoia”, referring to Ozzy Osbourne. This title isn’t likely to be seen in a newspaper but it is acceptable in this magazine. There was also alliteration used within the article.
A few articles were written in an interview style, which I did not see in the New Zealand Herald. There were quite a number of long quotes in the magazine articles. Advertising consisted of CD releases as well as movie releases. In summary, Rip It Up’s articles were mostly based on opinion, the opinion of the writer clearly came through in all the articles.
The New Zealand Herald was purely based on facts. The newspaper came across as professional and a very formal way of writing, compared to the magazine. The images in the newspaper were real life images; they were not edited simply to catch your attention but rather reflected a person or place for what it was.
Advertising in the newspaper was on a wide variety of products and services, air flights, cars on sale and what different banks had to offer. The newspaper was split into different topics and this was clear by the headings.
The titles were straight forward and they seemed to give the reader some indication of what the article was going to be about, such as “Police refer toddler’s death to coroner”. Whereas, the magazines titles seemed to have one aim and that was to catch your attention.
The audience clearly determines the editorial content, as well as the writing style of any newspaper or magazine article.
Women’s magazines like the ‘Woman’s Day’ have very colourful inviting covers that are always of happy good looking people. There is a lot of emotional articles in the ‘Woman’s Day’, they cover a lot of stories about babies and mothers, warm and fuzzy stories. Woman’s magazines are all about celebrities and what they are doing and their children. Women’s magazines are not always based on fact, something’s they are written by rumour and speculation and they also use pictures to write articles. Women’s magazines like ‘Woman’s Day’ feature a lot of advertising for women’s luxury products such as foundation and lipstick. There is also always a fashion section that show the latest trends and where to buy the clothes and for how much. Women’s magazines are mostly about physical appearance they have a health and beauty section showing you how to look a certain way and how to lose weight. “Spoilt Suri’s adult world” by ‘Woman’s Day’ is an article about Tom and Katie Cruise’s daughter Suri and the spoilt life she leads. This article isn’t an important news story it is more of a scandal story about a celebrity family. The magazine is criticizing the parenting skills of Katie and Tom Cruise. This particular article is written from photos of the mother and the toddler, also from what public witnesses saw. They speculate from the pictures “Suri looked so tired” and what ‘insiders’ say “Suri never hears the word no”. News websites such as “NZ Herald” display factual news stories up to date. It features the biggest stories around the world and nationally. The articles on this site are more news stories opposed to articles in magazines, they are written more on facts unlike some stories in women’s magazines. They inform us. There are pictures included in the news stories but just one or two not as many or on a large scale like magazine articles do. “Foodstuffs axes 100 jobs” by NZPA, is a news story that informs us of Foodstuffs Wellington making more than 100 people redundant in the lower North Island as part of a restructuring to save $4 million a year. This article only has one photo attached to it which is typical of news sites. This news story is based on facts and figures showing the number of workers affected and dollars they will save. This article doesn’t speculate it is just hard cold facts.
Start blogging by creating a new post. You can edit or delete me by clicking under the comments. You can also customize your sidebar by dragging in elements from the top bar.