The Communicative Functions of Tanzanian Online Newspaper Headlines

Abstract

This paper sought to analyse the communicative functions Tanzanian online newspaper headlines. A sample of Mwananchi and the Citizen dailies was obtained purposively from10 Tanzanian registered online newspapers. Also, the corpus of 259 front page headlines was randomly collected from the two digital papers. Using a checklist, the study collected and analysed data from the online newspaper headlines with SPSS version 20. The study revealed that 69.9 % of the two daily newspaper headlines observed the traditional communicative function of a newspaper headline that requires the headline to informative and summarise the articles it represents. However, a small fraction of newspaper headlines appeared to be less informative, ambiguous and vague, and metaphorically constructed in that readers could only understand their intentions either by clicking or reading the full articles or infer the meaning through contexts. The study concluded that the use of less informative headlines was the marketing strategy that the digital newspaper writers used to draw the attention of readers. The study recommended carrying out the study on how the newspaper headlines published impacted readership and visibility on the search engines and social platforms.