Every part of the first page of the newspaper is designed to pull in your attention. From the layout to the main picture to the headlining story all of these components are intended to grab the attention of the prospective reader through visual rhetoric. Maria Konnikova, who wrote an article discussing the impact of headlines, said, “a headline changes the way people read an article and the way they remember it.”
In the “Corpus Christi Caller-Times,” the front page had a headline saying “Police Overgunned” with the main picture of two black police officers holding rifles. The headline for this article begins to steer the reader to a negative point of view of the Police before even reading the context. The picture is also used to persuade the reader to bring to light their current opinion about police and guns even before reading the headline.
In the San Antonio Express-News, the headline that stands out first is “Coronoavirus in U.S. ‘not going to rest’ soon” with a graphic displaying statistics on the number of Coronavirus cases in different regions. However, on the other two-thirds of the page is a picture of a man in a dark and dirty room with the title of “Evictions looming as respite ends.” Both topics pull in a different type of reader. The graphic of Coronavirus cases draws in the logical reader (logos). The picture of the man in a dark room pulls people that are impacted by emotions (pathos).
How the front page of the paper is laid out can really affect how much a person is persuaded to agree with a topic through textual rhetoric.
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