For the people: Defining communities of readership through an Appraisal comparison of letters to two South African newspapers

•Readers of Daily Sun (tabloid) The Times (mainstream) perceived as very different.•Appraisal analysis shows both communities couple “education” with [+Valuation].•The Times’ readers say the education system is problematic (absent teachers etc.).•Daily Sun readers find fault with youth (unambitious) and parents (uninvolved).•The Times’ community is individualistic; Daily Sun community is cohesive.

This paper focuses on the affiliation of imagined communities (Anderson, 1983) around bonds that are created in 40 letters from the opinions pages of the Daily Sun, a tabloid, and The Times, a mainstream national newspaper. Bonds consist of couplings of interpersonal and ideational meaning that are revealed by an appraisal analysis of the letters, and show how the identity of the readership community is co-constructed by the letter writers. Ideational meaning is identified by generating frequency and keyword lists with a concordancer. The appraisal information provides an empirical base from which to compare the natures of the two newspapers’ readership communities in terms of how they view agency and group cohesion. This is done to explore whether the communities of readership are as different as they are perceived to be (by those who reject tabloids). Main findings show how both communities affiliate around the value of education, but The Times’ readers are more individualistic than the Daily Sun’s, who concentrate primarily on the behaviour of the group.