Email Reply

After sending my email to David Monk, the Deputy Editor of the Metro on the 7th October 2010, I received a reply the same day which included some really useful information. The answers that he gave to the questions I asked helped me to understand what's most important when choosing the right stories for the front page of the newspaper. I will use this information to help me create my first two pages of a newspaper for my coursework as successful as possible.

Here is the reply:

Hi Toni,

In short:

Who is your target audience and what do they like to see?

Our target readers are aged 18-44, live in cities and are fairly well-off. We expect them to want a digest of all the main news of the day plus some wacky stories, interesting pictures, celebrity gossip and international coverage – plus features, an entertainment section and sport, of course.

How do you decide what stories are newsworthy for your first two pages?

Our ‘first two pages’ would probably be defined as the front page and Page 5 in terms of important news. Page 2 is weather and index, Page 3 is wacky and often picture-led and Page 4 is a digest and often a political or financial story. In terms of our news judgment, we put the most interesting story on Page 1 and the second most interesting on Page 5. We decide them on what we think is most interesting to our audience – not necessarily the most important but the story they are most likely to want to pick up the paper and read. Every paper does the same, but papers have different readerships so the stories will be different.

How is the content of yours newspaper divided between topics, eg; sport, celebrity, real life stories, factual news and advertisements?

Adverts make up roughly half the paper. Sport takes up around eight pages a day, celebrity two pages – the rest is decided day by day.

Copy of the email