Tabloidization and settimanalizzazione

The aim of every journalist is to give an objective account of the facts trying to achieve effectiveness and clarity. But the use of language is at the core of the journalism and, as many media studies have shown, language involves the ideas and the beliefs of their users. In fact “just as language is a socially constructed form of communication so too is news and its own varieties of language.” The language of newspapers is particularly important because it intervenes in “the social construction of reality”. News is a representation of the world in language and, as in every representation, they share their users‟ values. Anything that is said or written about the world is articulated from a particular ideological position.
Moreover, media studies have also shown that the beliefs presented inside the language, “Tend to be consonant with the ideas of controlling groups in an industrial-capitalist society, because news is an industry with its own commercial self-interest.”
Facts in order to be transformed into news have to be manipulated. One of the methods used is the selection of facts, as not all the facts can be presented in a newspaper. So newspapers create an agenda setting giving to each fact a value and dividing these events according to this given newsworthiness. Since newsworthiness cannot use an objective parameter, therefore the front page is not a merely and faithful report of the news of the world. However, some criteria have been established in the journalistic activity in order to establish a value for news according to more general values about society, journalistic conventions, nature of sources and publication frequency and schedules. The more values a fact covers, the more it is likely to be in the agenda setting and therefore to be published.
When a journalist has to write an article his or her aim is to narrow the gap between bureaucratic and personal discourse, but it is not just a stylistic matter, rather it is more a way of communicating through the use of a “neutral” language that embodies widely shared values. The values and beliefs are implicit or presupposed. The discrepancy exists as the newspaper represent an institution and the reader is a person, so the typical way of communicating is different as the newspaper uses the written language, a language whose connotations are formality and authority, whilst people use the oral channel, a more informal language. The devices generally used in order to narrow this communicative gap are of three kinds: use different sets of register, use different kind of dialect and use different set of modes, that means use the written or oral speech form. The oral speech form is used in newspapers in order to give the impression of having a conversation and thus making the article more lively and more interesting. Furthermore, it gives the idea of informality, familiarity and friendliness as it gives the idea of co-operation and symmetry, cancelling thus the idea of authority that the written form could convey. The tools used in order to give the impression of a speech form are varied: through the use of typographical devices to break the uniformity of the printed text, and particularly relevant in this case is the use of different typefaces in tabloids in order to convey the idea of different stresses, tone and pace, or the use of misspelled words on purpose in order to draw the attention to pronunciation or to recall dialectical forms, the use of printing devices in order to convey the pitch and movement of voice or paralanguage, or the use of the information structure of the speech, breaking the information into short sentences. Also the use of different registers in order to achieve their goal-so slang, idioms, clichés, puns and proverbs, first names, diminutives and nicknames are extensively used by tabloids, which avoid any learned word.