Investigation into some of the statistical differences between The Times and The Telegraph on a specific day
Design and Planning
The aim of this project is to compare two daily published broadsheets. The two papers that will be used are THE TIMES and THE TELEGRAPH, both purchased on the same day. A lot of data can be easily collected from a newspaper, ranging from average word length to area devoted to adverts per page.
The project will attempt to reach conclusions regarding three specific questions. In answering these questions a range of sampling methods, presentation of data, and statistical calculations will be used in order to interpret and evaluate the data and come to a valid conclusion, drawing together all the data.
Each question will be presented and it will be explained what statistical methods will be involved in drawing conclusions for these questions.
* How does the font size of the headline text affect the length of the article?
This involves comparing two sets of data:
* Font Size of Headline text: A sheet was printed from Microsoft Word that had various font sizes in the Times New Roman font, the standard font for the two papers, printed on it. This was used as a guideline when compiling all the data.
* Length of column of each article : In The Times and The Telegraph there is a standard column width and simply measuring the vertical length of all the columns in the article gives a suitably accurate indication of the length of the article
To make any calculations accurate enough to draw a valid conclusion at least twenty sets of data from each paper will need to be collected. As each page has approximately three articles on it and both newspapers have roughly thirty pages as systematic sample of every 4 pages will provide enough data to support any conclusion.
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