The two different newspapers I chose wedding announcements from were the Cape Cod Times, and the Hartford Courant. I decided to choose these two different papers because I live in Cape Cod during the summers and my home resident is in Essex CT, which is close to Hartford. These, other than the major newspapers such as New York Times and smaller news sources such as my local newspaper, are the only papers I have read consistently throughout my life. As I began to navigate their websites, I noticed the uncanny similarity between the two newspapers, especially within the wedding announcements. The formats were even similar. Both of the websites’ wedding announcement sections were “powered” by Legacy.com, which I furthered investigated to be the leading provider of obituaries to online newspaper sites all over the country. Legacy.com has also expanded their horizons to not only obituaries but also to general announcements, such as engagements, births and weddings. Based on a format assessment alone, I was able to judge that both of these newspapers and their wedding announcement sections in particular are similar. This means they are targeting a similar audience, an audience capable of using a search engine such as Legacy.com to find wedding announcements.
But within the content of the wedding announcements alone these two newspapers are similar as well. Both the bride and the groom on the entire first page of wedding announcements on both websites were middle age, white, Caucasian, and straight. This rules out the fact that these type of newspapers are targeting gay audiences, inner city, mostly black, audiences, and poorer audiences. Wedding announcements are a function within the newspaper for pure entertain of the people reading the article. Entertainment within the announcement section serves through readers reacting to exciting news of people like them, or people they might know. So if newspapers publish all white, all middle income, all straight, type of couples, these are the types of people they think their audiences will connect to, or possibly know. Why would a newspaper audience be interested in a wedding announcement of a couple that their readers cannot connect to? They wouldn’t. And this is why wedding announcements in both the Cape Cod Times and the Hartford Courant tell us that these are the type of people newspapers are targeting.