Modeling your work at least loosely on the individual chapters in the text, present a brief overview of the country and the city in which the newspaper is published. Include key historical events that have affected the country and city and relevant details about the country's population.
Include also a brief overview of the particular newspaper, reporting, if possible, on its ownership, its history, its format, its influence, its circulation, and the like.
Look at five issues of your newspaper. A few of you will use printed editions; most of you will use online editions. Whether printed or online editions, be sure to note the dates and the days of the week on which they appeared. (You do not have to choose a sample that includes five different days of the week. The only requirement is that you analyze five separate editions.)
Here are some of the matters you should look at:
STRUCTURE: What does the newspaper look like? If you're working with printed editions, describe the format (broadsheet or tabloid) and report on the sections (denoted by section fronts and divisions inside the newspaper). If you're working with online editions, describe as fully as you can what the reader sees when he or she calls up the newspaper and scrolls through its home page. Be as specific as you can in describing the various features, whether your paper is a print version or an online version.
APPROACH: Examine the content of the newspaper to judge whether it is a paper of predominantly serious purposes intent on informing the public first and entertaining the public second or a paper of tabloid tendency, eager to entertain its readership with a blend of human interest, celebrity doings, sex, crime, and other titillating matters.
CONTENT: List the subjects of the stories that get prominent play in your newspaper, the prominence identified in the case of a printed newspaper by a story's placement on the front and in the case of an online newspaper by its placement high on the home page.
SPECIFIC CONTENT: Identify the topic (See the appendix of your text) of the various stories on your list and see whether you can draw some very unscientific conclusions about the distribution of topics in your newspaper.
ONLINE CHARACTERISTICS: If your newspaper is an online product, analyze how it differs from a printed version of the same newspaper. What are the features that the online edition exploits that a printed version can't.
DOCUMENTATION
Do not use a formal style of documentation such as APA, MLA, or Chicago. Include references to sources informally in the text of your paper. If, for example, you were citing the handout on the CIA's influence on El Mercurio, you might simply write something like: "According to an article in The Columbia Journalism Review in May 2000 (or whatever the actual date was), El Mercurio . . ."
LENGTHS:
Your oral presentation should be about five- to 10-minutes long. Your paper should be about five pages.