An A-Level Study Day at BFI

The day didn't start off too well as we turned up late and managed to miss the whole introduction, but it soon turned around when Rob Miller's lectures began.

Firstly we looked at media language and representation. In this section we discussed the differing newspaper formats - Broadsheets, tabloids, etc- however we drew special focus to mid-market tabloids (or hybrids).

Mid-market tabloid conventions:

-Include both soft and hard news

-Have a target audience of middle class-middle age-middle England

-Borrow conventions from tabloids; for instance:

-Larger, bold, uppercase fonts

-An emotive epistemology

-Traditional typography

-Headlines that tend to explore moral panic

-Direct yet informal mode of address

-Prominent use of pronouns; e.g., 'we' and 'you'.

-Called 'Black Tops' due to the black heading

-Subjective rather than objective epistemology

We then had a short break that lead us into session 2. In this section we spoke about 'Contexts and Industry Overview', which was interesting as we were able to compare the print circulation of both 'The Guardian' and 'That Daily Mail' (The Daily Mail has a higher print circulation, however it has less of a presence online). We also spoke about the reasons why there is less interest in printed newspapers and who bought them; for instance, there is less interest in the industry, more e-media, less Eco-friendly, older generation, etc... Which then lead us onto session 3 after lunch, in which we were looking at the 'End of Audience Theory' by Clay Shirky.

We then had a Q&A with Joseph Harker the 'Deputy Opinion Editor' at 'The Guardian'. This session of the seminar lead to some... controversial things being said, but it didn't falter our interest.

The last session was number 4, in which Rob Miller spoke about Regulation in the media. Truth be told my attention had faded by this point so i can't quite recall what happened, but I'm sure it was relevant and helpful.