A Semiotic Analysis of a Newspaper Story

A logical place to start may be to ask ‘what is news?’ Professor Jonathan Bignell suggests that ‘news is not just facts, but representations produced in language and other signs like photographs.’ The newspaper is just one medium of news communication; other media include television, radio, magazines, and the Internet. We will concentrate on a particular news item as covered in three different British daily newspapers, namely The Sun, The Telegraph, and The Times. The story which is being covered is that of the death of a female police officer who was stabbed by a man whilst she was on duty. The medium of the newspaper is particularly interesting as signifiers are presented simultaneously thus offering a concrete display of signs which the reader can consume at their own pace and can also be re-read, as opposed to television or radio news which can only be watched or listened to at particular times. The process of selection is central to the production of all newspapers. This involves selecting events which are considered to be worthy of being printed as news, and excluding news which is considered to be irrelevant, insignificant or unworthy of news coverage. Thus news is a social construct dependent on what is deemed to be important by those who work in the ‘news industry’ based on certain codes of behaviour which have been learned by news workers in order to do their job. The codes of behaviour which have been learnt by news workers undoubtedly depend on the particular newspaper for which they are working.

It could be suggested that in British society most adults would be aware of the conventions of different newspapers. We will attempt to examine the types of sign systems within which a particular news story is encoded in a selection of newspapers, and how these different sign systems may affect meaning. It is clear when looking at The Sun, The Telegraph, and The Times articles, which were all published on Saturday, April 18th, 1998 that each