Active learning ideas
The Press unit focuses on the power of newspapers to shape public opinion. Students learn the stylistic and content differences between 'tabloids' (like The Sun) and 'broadsheets' (like The Guardian), focusing on how they use language and layout to target different social classes. They explore 'news values', the criteria editors use to decide if a story is 'newsworthy'.
Activity 01
Give groups 10 'raw' news stories. They must rank them in order of importance for a tabloid and then for a broadsheet, explaining which 'news values' (e.g., Proximity, Conflict, Celebrity) influenced their decisions.
What are the stylistic differences between tabloids and broadsheets?
Activity 02
Show a neutral news fact. Students work in pairs to write one 'sensationalist' tabloid headline and one 'factual' broadsheet headline for it, then discuss how each headline tries to manipulate the reader's emotions.
How do news values determine what gets published?
Activity 03
Display front pages from five different newspapers covering the same political event. Students move around with a 'bias checklist' to identify how each paper uses 'loaded language' or 'selective images' to support a specific viewpoint.
How does political bias affect the reporting of a news story?
A few notes on teaching this unit
Watch Out for These Misconceptions
News is always 100% objective and factual.
While news should be factual, the 'selection and omission' of facts is a form of bias. By comparing different papers, students see that 'the truth' is often framed by the newspaper's own political and social values.
Tabloids are 'bad' and broadsheets are 'good'.
Both have different functions and target different audiences. Tabloids are often more successful at engaging a mass audience through 'human interest' stories. We teach students to analyze the 'effectiveness' of each for its target audience rather than making a moral judgment.
Methods used in this brief
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