Our last class started with an activity around the International Herald Tribune. Each of us got a sample of the newspaper. After going through the three first pages we had to draw conclusions about the newspaper.
About the audience:
This newspaper was originally named the New-York Herald Tribune but changed his name when his audience changed. Although it’s an American style newspaper it’s not written for an American audience. People who read the International Herald Tribune are people who read English and they are spread all over the world. Given the type of audience we understand more easily why the news in this newspaper comes from all over the world. The luxury adds on each page allow us to conclude that the targeted audience is quite wealthy. Finally, the business section (at least three to four pages per sample) highlights the fact that this newspaper is more and more written for a businessmen audience.
About the layouts:
The two first pages are hard news which is a basic rule for all the newspapers. Although it’s for an international audience the first page is still focused on an American audience. The newspaper cut the articles of the first page to make us go inside and see the adverts. The adverts are taking an incredible amount of space, some of them even take one whole page (e.g. add for Omega watchmaker) but they are the investors of the newspaper so they have every right to do this.
About the contents:
At the end of the newspaper we can find the sport section and the business section.
On page two and eight we can find two kinds of editorial that help us guess the orientation of the newspaper and the author’s opinion.
Some articles appear to be biased but that doesn’t mean that the author is actually biased. In fact, reporters are in the field and write an article but the editors are the ones who put it together (subtitle, title, length, location within the newspaper…). The way the article is presented gives us the first impression on the subject and sometimes this impression might be slightly different from the one the real author wanted us to have.
Then, we moved on to a second activity; we watched the beginning of the documentary Food Inc.. This film was realised by Robert Kenner, and tries to unveil the truth about what American population eat. This film is divided in different chapters. We watched the beginning of the first one named Fast Food to all food. Nowadays most of the food comes from assembly lines where both workers and animals are being abused but companies don’t want anybody to know.
This part begins with the interview of Eric Schlosser, the author of Fast Food Nation. He became aware of the fact that all his life he had had no clue of the origins of the food he was eating. That’s the reason why he decided to become an investigative journalist. At that time he had no idea that only a handful of companies had the power over the whole food industry.
The biggest change in agriculture came from the Mc Donalds brothers in the 1930s. They brought the factory at the back of the kitchen, simplified the menu and it became the tremendous business we all know about. Nowadays Mc Donald’s company is the largest buyer of beef, chicken, apple… in the
And this is the same for the other kind of meat (chicken, pork…). Those four giants are: SWIFT, CARGILL, TYSON and National Beef.
This is where we stopped to watch, hope we will watch some more next Thursday.
VOCABULARY:
Feature article: article de fond
Scraping the barrel : racler les fonds de tirroir
Spinning : filage, filature. To spin a yarn : débiter une longue histoire.
Ripe : mûr.
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