Wednesday 30 May 2012

Shropshire star essay


The shropshire star is a regional newspaper in the UK and it covers the whole of shropshire, herefordshire, parts of herefordshire, worcestershire, cheshire, the llangollen area and northern Powys in the UK. The newspaper is made, printed and distributed 6 days a week. The paper now costs 42p but has been cheaper in the past. The newspaper can be bought at almost every news-agent, supermarket or garage, this means that the paper is easily bought and read. The shropshire star has many editions, these including  county, south, north, west and east. The shropshire star also has many stories inside and this makes is very good value for money. It is also possible to pay for the paper to be delivered to your house 6 days a week and this furthers the interest as it is no longer an effort to buy and collect. The actual newspaper consist of many things, including stories, advertisements, jobs, venues and many others.
The shropshire star is owned by the Midland news association, which is a very well known company as they own many other newspapers and radio stations. The Midland news association has newspapers such as the shrewsbury chronicle and the Market Drayton advertiser.
The newspaper was also the first post war evening newspaper, this effected almost everything about the newspaper, its popularity, its stories, it style, it effected everything. Its first edition was released on the 5th October 1964. This also opened up for other opportunities for the newspaper, this included the chance to become a leading newspaper and very influential one. The Shropshire star then started to use a very more effective way of printing, this used a roller that had the images and text printed onto it and then the paper was simply passed over it, this ended up being a much more effective and cheap way of printing the newspaper than the standard hot metal typesetting, which had to have each letter placed into a mould and then printed out.
Another convention of the shropshire star is that it is a very popular website, it was the very first newspapers to have its own website and this made it very influential as the other newspapers had to try and keep up with the trend setting newspaper it has more than 180,000 people visiting it every month. The website also includes allot of additional information like stats on the amount of people that visit the website and the stats on its success , these are good additions to the website because it makes the newspaper look good, not only because of the actual stats but because of the effort they went through to find them out
The circulation of the shropshire star was more than 55,000 for january 2012. There is also allot of statistics on the audience that can be accessed through the website, these starts include the amount of adults, men, women and different age groups buy the paper and stats on what each person does, this includes how they get their newspaper. For example, The total readership was 139927 adults, 82% of these readers have their papers home delivered. With 71370 being Men and 68558 being Women. This information is not needed but it is nice to be able to see.The shropshire star is in a tabloid format, which is typically what a newspaper looks like. The paper is not considered a top end newspaper and for this you get a very good quality news paper. The newspaper nowadays is colour but it has not always been so, the first colour edition of the star was released in march 1967, this was a huge convention because it had never been done before, the picture could not have been more appropriate because it was one of the queen s she came to visit shropshire. The very large picture of the queen was very memorable.
Most of local newspapers front page headlines are big new that wont only effect the county, they are usually stories that effect the whole country, this adds importance to them and it makes the newspaper seem more legit. 

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