Functions of the news
Have students access the student chapter Functions of the News and go through it the text at the top. Have them complete the interactive activity to look ata sample news home page (from The Guardian, a UK newspaper) and identify whether each of the hotspots is a hard news story, a soft news story, an opinion article or an analysis article.
Highlight the following points:
- You can tell the Ukraine/France story is hard news because it’s timely – if it weren’t reported soon after it happened, it wouldn’t be news.
- “Girls Aloud’s 20 best songs”: “Top songs” or “best selling songs” might be a news or analysis article, but “best” is definitely an opinion.
- Lost and Found: This story could have happened at any time, which tells you it’s soft news.
- Will Smith and Chris Rock: Stories about celebrities are usually seen as soft news, but not always: if a celebrity was running in an election, that might be hard news.
- ‘Being queer is amazing’: Though the headline contains an opinion, the quotation marks show that it belongs to a person quoted in the story. That means this is a soft news story, not an opinion or explainer article.
- Royal resignation: The word “Explainer” shows it’s an analysis story.
- COP15 deal: This article is asking and answering a question, but it’s not taking a position. That makes it an analysis article.
- “I am grateful”: The word “I” is a clue that this is an opinion story.
- “Endless debt”: This is an opinion article that assumes you share at least some of the writer’s beliefs and assumptions.
Now have students see what other hard news, soft news, opinion and explainer articles they can spot:
Most of the stories in the top half of the page are hard news stories because they are about topics like war and politics.
Examples of soft news stories are the release of the Netflix documentary and the human trials of the brain chip. The story about teens’ brains showing more signs of ageing after the pandemic is probably a soft news story unless there is something that makes it urgent (such as if some teens were being hospitalized as a result.) Sports stories, like the World Cup story here, are a good example of soft news because they have little real impact but are still important to the people who read them.
This news source makes it easy to find opinion stories by marking them clearly. A clear sign that these are opinion pieces is the use of the first person (“I am grateful”, “we have the tools.”)