Newspaper Front Pages: The Guardian and The Sun (2025 editions)
The Guardian and The Sun: Two Front Pages, Two Audiences
This lesson studies the two set newspaper front pages you need to know in detail: The Guardian (06 May 2025) and The Sun (22 March 2025). In the exam, you are given a printed copy of one of these front pages and asked to analyse its media language, explain its context of production, or compare it with an unseen newspaper front page in the same media form.
Both papers cover very different lead stories, but each front page is built from the same toolkit of media language choices — image selection, headline wording, colour, typography and layout — combined to construct meaning for a target audience. Learning the specific facts about each product is essential: you cannot analyse what you do not recognise.
The Guardian (06 May 2025): Ownership and Audience
The Guardian is owned by The Scott Trust, which reinvests all of its profits back into journalism rather than paying shareholders. This ownership model lets the paper hold to its own journalistic principles rather than a purely commercial one. Its estimated daily print circulation was around 88,779 in 2020 (circulation figures have been kept private since September 2021). The audience is 86% ABC1, 54% male, with an average print reader age of 54.
The Guardian is owned by The Scott Trust, a non-shareholder model that reinvests profits into journalism. Its target audience is 86% ABC1 with an average reader age of 54.
The Guardian has mainstream left political values without being affiliated to any party, and this shapes its softer, more considered word choices. Although originally a broadsheet, cost pressures and changing reader habits mean it has been printed in tabloid format for several years, while keeping the serious, considered house style associated with broadsheet journalism.
The Guardian’s Front Page: Media Language
The dominant image on the 06 May 2025 front page is a wide shot of the Prince and Princess of Wales with their children on the Buckingham Palace balcony, watching the VE Day 80th anniversary flypast. Prince William wears his RAF uniform and Catherine wears a purple dress and hat, formal choices that connote the monarchy’s tradition and authority. The photograph is fixed in meaning through anchorage — a caption explains the family are leaning left to see the flypast, turning what could look like an off-guard moment into a relatable, unified family scene.
The main headline, ‘No 10 to rethink fuel payment cut as local election losses alarm MPs’, combines two political stories in typical broadsheet style. ‘No 10’ is shorthand for the UK government. The word ‘rethink’ is a softer choice than a right-wing paper might use for the same story, connoting careful reconsideration rather than panic, reflecting The Guardian’s left-leaning sympathy with a Labour government. ‘Alarm’, however, injects drama to intrigue readers into buying the paper.
Elsewhere on the page, dramatic words like ‘axe’ and ‘risk’ appear in the off-lead stories — ‘axe’ appears in the story at the foot of the page about Macmillan Cancer Support cutting local welfare services, suggesting brutality and finality and placing The Guardian on the side of the community affected by the cuts, another small signal of its left-leaning values.
The page’s design follows The Guardian’s house style: a deep sapphire blue for newsstand visibility and brand recognition across print and digital platforms, red type near the masthead byline lines to signal a news story, and yellow used only for emphasis. Headlines use the Guardian Titlepiece font; body copy uses Guardian Egyptian, designed for legibility at small print sizes. The skyline strip promotes lighter G2 and Sport stories.
Gender is represented through professional women and men. Female journalists Pippa Crerar and Jessica Elgot are bylined on the lead story. Blake Lively appears in a headshot wearing a black blazer, connoting professionalism, anchored by the description ‘Hollywood actor’ rather than victim, even though the story covers her legal conflict. The Princess of Wales is shown in both her royal role and as a mother. Men — Keir Starmer, Sadiq Khan, Donald Trump, Prince William and Trent Alexander-Arnold — all appear in positions of power or professional uniform, suggesting UK and US political life is patriarchal, though William is shown equally alongside Catherine as a parent.
Age is represented across three generations: Millennials (Blake Lively, William and Catherine), Gen Z (Alexander-Arnold) and Gen Alpha (Prince George, Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis). The royal children are shown taking part in official duties, representing the monarchy’s future and echoing the original 1945 VE Day balcony photograph of a young Princess Elizabeth. In the main image, younger and older generations share the same curiosity and engagement, brought together by the occasion.
The Sun (22 March 2025): Ownership and Audience
The Sun is owned by News UK, part of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. It has an average daily print circulation of roughly 1.3 million copies and a daily readership of around 2.2 million, though News Corp stopped releasing exact figures in 2020. The Sun claims it still sells 18 copies a second. Its print audience is mostly male, C2DE, and aged 35 to 64. It has a reading age of around eight.
The Sun is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp (News UK) and sells around 1.3 million print copies a day to a mainly male, C2DE, 35-64 audience.
The Sun’s Front Page: Media Language
The headline ‘Faulty Powers’ is an intertextual pun on the 1970s sitcom Fawlty Towers, which celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2025. The ‘Y’ and ‘S’ are printed wonky, echoing the misspelled hotel sign that was a running joke in the sitcom, and implying chaos and incompetence in Britain’s infrastructure and, more subtly, in the Labour government’s management of it.
Bullet-point sub-headings above the main image work as enigma codes, teasing how the fire started, how Britain was ‘humiliated’, and why the back-up power ‘failed’ — questions only answered if the reader buys the paper.
The front page gives most of its space to a tightly cropped, dramatic night-time image of the Hayes electrical substation fire. Reds, oranges and yellows connote danger and destruction, while a cropped ‘Heathrow Closed’ information board adds proximity and veracity, suggesting reporters were on the scene as the story broke. Emotive body copy words like ‘shambolic’, ‘disaster’, ‘fiasco’ and ‘mayhem’ are typical tabloid language, suited to the paper’s roughly eight-year-old reading age.
The off-lead ‘Kym and the Fab at 50 Club’ uses an archive image of actress and presenter Kym Marsh in a red gown, connoting red-carpet glamour. A second off-lead, ‘Myles Better’, puns on footballer Myles Lewis-Skelley’s name after his goal for England against Albania, alongside captain Harry Kane. In the masthead, a ‘Get 2 Tickets’ Alton Towers offer shows synergy between the two brands: Alton Towers gets promotion for its new season, and The Sun offers an incentive to buy the print edition rather than read free content online.
Gender is represented more stereotypically than in The Guardian. Kym Marsh is constructed as glamorous and decorative through her red dress and its plunging neckline, an image some argue positions women as passive objects of visual pleasure used to sell papers. Myles Lewis-Skelley and Harry Kane are constructed as dynamic and successful, reinforcing traditional masculine stereotypes and appealing to The Sun’s largely male readership.
Age is represented through Kym Marsh’s ‘Fab at 50 Club’ story, using an archive photograph taken when she was around 39 — without saying so — which could suggest that women who visibly look their age are seen as less desirable, reinforcing an ‘ageless beauty’ stereotype. Myles Lewis-Skelley (18) and Harry Kane (31) are represented in the same energetic, competitive way, showing how sports coverage tends to flatten age differences in favour of focusing on achievement.
Comparing Context Across the Two Front Pages
The two papers’ political contexts explain many of their language choices. The Guardian is owned by The Scott Trust and leans left, so its headline about the fuel payment cut uses the considered word ‘rethink’ rather than attacking the government directly. The Sun is owned by Murdoch’s right-leaning News Corp, so its headline about a national infrastructure failure blames the Labour government indirectly through the sitcom pun ‘Faulty Powers’ and hyperbolic body copy. Comparing ownership, audience and word choice is useful practice for the extended comparison task, where you compare a set product with an unseen newspaper front page in the same media form.
The Guardian’s left-leaning ownership (The Scott Trust) produces softer word choices like ‘rethink’; The Sun’s right-leaning ownership (News Corp) produces sharper, blame-driven language like the ‘Faulty Powers’ pun.