English tabloid: The Sun vs Romanian

tabloid: Click!
Introduction:
The Sun is a daily tabloid newspaper published in the United Kingdom and Ireland. It was
founded in 1964 as a successor broadsheet to the Daily Herald. It became a tabloid in 1969 after
it was purchased by its current owners.1 The tabloid had the largest circulation of any daily
newspaper in the United Kingdom, but in late 2013 slipped to second largest Saturday
newspaper. It had an average daily circulation of 2.2 million copies in March 2014. The Sun
covers subjects such as: sports, TV & Showbiz and it also contains a video section in which you
can find subjects ranging from what was the last thing that the Kardashian clan did or what is the
latest discovery in the scientific field or maybe news regarding how a 57 year old male TV star
paid a 13 year old girl for sex.
The Sun tabloid can also be found on-line accessing the web page: www.thesun.co.uk .
The first picture shows how the front page of the newspaper looks and the following picture
illustrates how the home page of the on-line page appears to the readers.

1 "The Sun (United Kingdom)." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, n.d. Web. 05 Jan. 2016.

Click! is a Romanian tabloid owned by Adevrul Holding. In the year 2009, Click! was
the best selling Romanian newspaper with 208.903 copies per edition. Just as in the case of The
Sun tabloid from England Click! is the successor of Averea. Averea was a general newspaper
from Romania, popular christian democratic orientated, with accent on the economical
information. It was founded in 2005, but in 2006 it repositioned itself as a tabloid, with an
agressive communication campaign. Subsequent, in Februray 2007, the newspaper changed its
name to Click!.
Click! tabloid offers topics such as: news, stars, sport, entertainment. There is also and
on-line form of the tabloid, not only a printed one. The following pictures illustrate how the two
sources look like.

When it comes to the comparison of the two tabloides first of all we can start with
comparing the founding date: The Sun was foundes in 1964, later becoming a tabloid in 1969,
whereas Click! was founded only in 2005 transitioning in 2006 to a tabloid. From this point of
view it is clear that The Sun has much more influene and acknowledgement in this field. If we
compare the sales of the two, it is obvious which tabloid is on the first line: The Sun. Click!
managed to be the best selling newspaper in Romania in 2009 with sales of 208.903 copies per
edition whereas The Sun has aproximately a daily circulation of 2.2 milion copies per month.
Even though there is such a big discrepancy between the sales and the popularity of the
two tabloids, their aspect and topics are quite alike: TV stars, fashion models, sports and lots of

quotidian news and happenings. Despite the similarities of their choice of topics I consider there
is a quality difference regarding the content of the news, the quality in which the news are
written and also the level of explicit content showed in both pictures and the language used.
To continue with I will analyse the way in which the two tabloids approach certain
characteristics of their content: language, display, advertising, photographs, quality and
importance of their news, etc.
Language:
Both tabloids use pretty explicit language. Words such as: sex are quite common used.
From what I have read in order to complete this task, I found out that the Romanian tabloid uses
more strong words that the English tabloid: the word sex is much more used and words such as
sexy, prostitute, whore, porno, rape, violence are used. I consider that the Romanian
tabloid uses much more strong words than the English one. Also what I have noticed is that the
Romanians tabloid choice of topics is mostly influenced by topics such as: who slept with who,
a TV star has a baby with someone else than their spouse, which woman is the lover of a certain
football player, etc. whereas even though we can find this topics in the English tabloid, they are
not the dominant ones.
Regarding language the Romanian tabloid often chooses a misleading title for their
articles: many times it happened that I was attracted by a title saying: Shock! Tragic death in the
life of x but in fact the article was not about a person, but instead of a pet. I do not consider this
technique a good one because it misleads the readers.
The Sun tabloid was involved in a scandal in October 2013 2 regarding the title of their
main article on the front page. The title in question was 1.200 killed by mental patients. The
title suggests that mental patients killed 1,200 people. This title is misleading since when paying
close attention to the sub-title of the article you can read the following: Shock 10-year toll
exposes care crisis. Only after we read the sub-title and the article we are informed that those
killings mentioned in the title of the article are in a span of 10 years, they did not happen all at a
2 The first picture.

time, such as you can understand from the articles title. After this number of the tabloid was
launched two mental health charities: Mind and Rethink Mental Illness criticised the choice of
words that The Sun used on their front page. Not only people with mental illness are already
marginalised in society, the article contributed to the belief that mental patients are prone to
commit murders, this is what the critics had to say about the choice of words that The Sun used
on their cover.
Display
Regarding the display of the two tabloids I consider both The Sun and Click! use the same
techniques to attract readers. A bolded and catchy article title with an attention gathering picture,
such as the following:

The above pictures represent one article from The Sun and one from Click!. In both cases
we can identify a big bolded title, followed by a sub-title and a picture that captivates our
attention and makes us curious about what might have happened there.
Photographs:

3 Click!

From my point of view the Romanian tabloid, Click!, is dominated by pictures that
illustrate women in provocative postures or even naked.

The English tabloid uses provocative pictures also, but in a lower number than the
Romanian one.
Both Romanian and English tabloids make use of explicit photos in their articles. In the
following pictures you can see a baby who has a rash infection after his mother gave him
medication.

The following picture is

from the Romanian tabloid, and I
consider it is more explicit than the
first picture showed. During my
research I have not seen something
similar in the English tabloid. The
topic is about sexual activities done
by students in the university campus. I consider images such as the one above should not
be the primary one in an article because children may have access to this newspapers or on-line
sites and this explicit content is not an appropriate one.
Content:
The following extract talks about how tabloids manage to interest us and how certain
classes of people are exemplified in their topics:
Mass media gossip is interesting to many people, as evidenced by the proliferation of
gossip magazines and gossip television shows. Despite its popularity, there has been little
research into the evolutionary underpinnings of why gossip contains particular topics.
Furthermore, no one has provided input to those working in gossip-based media. Therefore, we
begin by defining and explaining mass media gossip using an evolutionary, biosocial perspective.
To demonstrate that the media workers may benefit from relying on knowledge of evolved
human nature in their work, we conducted a study. We examined the content of three successful
tabloids, using a list of evolutionary-based topics created a priori. The results indicate that
tabloids reflect fitness-relevant topics that were important throughout our evolutionary past. The
tabloids equally represent both sexes, and while they mostly concentrate on entertainers and
royalty, they do pay some attention to unknown individuals. By correlating who and what is
gossiped about, we found celebrities are more often the subjects of stories involving wealth,
while unknown individuals are almost always gossiped about within the context of life-

threatening events. We use our study to provide guidelines for those working in media, which
will hopefully enable their work to obtain maximum audience interest.4
After reading the article I can understand that people are attracted to gossip, their desire
to know how rich peoples lives are is quite predominant, while not so known people are often
found in articles regarding crime, violence or some terrible accident.
Advertising:
When it comes to advertising we can find all sorts of topics: on-line matrimonial,
clothing advertising, etc. What I have seen is that the on-line page of the Romanian tabloid often
remembers the cookies from the search history of the browser and the advertising on the on-line
version of the newspaper often contains information from the sites I have visited previously.

This advertise is from the English tabloid, The Sun.

Conclusion;
To conclude with I consider that the English tabloid, The Sun, is much more structured
and contains a better content than the Romanian one, Click!. Also I can add the fact that the
Romanian tabloid uses more explicit pictures than the English one, which may harm if children
manage to read or look at the pictures inside the tabloid.

4 Fisher, Maryanne, and Charlotte De Backer. "Tabloids as Windows into Our Interpersonal
Relationships: A Content Analysis of Mass Media Gossip from an Evolutionary
Perspective." Researchgate.net. N.p., Jan. 2012. Web. 14 Jan. 2016.

1. "The Sun (United Kingdom)." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, n.d. Web. 25 Jan. 2016.

2. Fisher, Maryanne, and Charlotte De Backer. "Tabloids as Windows into Our Interpersonal
Relationships: A Content Analysis of Mass Media Gossip from an Evolutionary
Perspective." Researchgate.net. N.p., Jan. 2012. Web. 14 Jan. 2016.