Rhetoric on Town Website Analysis: The New York Times
- The New York Times
- rhetorical analysis: Identify the purpose and audience of the website and describe how you know that these are the purpose and audience. Who do you think is the intended audience, be specific? Can you define the probable readers in terms of age, gender, occupation, education, position of power? How can you tell based on the image and/or the context in what the website is found? What range of positions on the issue might target readers hold before reading? What is the image prompting the reader/viewer to do after consuming the text? The audience of the New York times is practically the world whole outside that of non-english/illiterate people. I remember when I was traveling over in Asia and on many of the flights, they would offer this newspaper. Their audience is global in terms of printed paper and I expect none the less from their website. I believe the intended audience to be mainly Americans of an educated and wealthy status, a person that is involved with current events. The front page offers advertisements that aren’t household goods, but brand name accessories. This targets an audience with a high disposable income, so possibly upper-middle class and definitely not the people in your average public library. The front page also carries many international issues, which generically are not the main concern of lower class individuals.
- design element analysis: Identify the all seven design elements and how they working within the website.
- Repetition: The website does have certain repeating themes, but not many seeing that it is a newspaper site bent on having the most up-to-date information as possible. The window panes and headings are repeated to show uniformity in structure and clarity of reading.
- Balance: This is where I always have trouble with newspapers because I find the articles so unbalanced. They are wishy-washy in my opinion even though I know that they try to fit the most information in the possible spaces, but this is a website. I expect more than a conglomerate of window panes, but a better structure. There is a heading at the top and correlating sub headings.
- Contrast: There isn’t much in terms of contrasts outside the white background and black lettering that mimics newspapers of old.
- Flow: The flow is tied with the Balance. At first the paper wants you to read from up to down, but the disjointedness of the window panes doesn’t direct your attention to any next specific target.
- Alignment: The page is aligned against a grid.
- Emphasis: Emphasis is placed upon the headings of each article with a different blue font.
- Proximity: Everything is held tightly placed together. In my opinion, too tightly.
- design & rhetorical analysis:
- The design elements are made to mimic the olden days when newspapers were circulated more than toilet paper. This has ceased to be the case, since the internet has been more readily available to others. They do accomplish their goal of being readable just like the old newspapers, but I wish they were different. There is also the use of images in the site that makes it more attractive and the use of a sidebar column for navigability.
- copyright & attribution:The site is professional in its uses of copyrights. The images are either watermarked or captioned with respect to the author. All of the articles are listed with the authors name either at the beginning or the end depending if they are editorial or not.