Evaluation

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

For our newspaper we were specifically creating a local newspaper, trying to produce and in some ways replicate our local newspaper. As a result these papers are neither stereotypical broadsheet nor tabloid papers. Although I researched into national newspapers to gather a wider range of layout techniques that could engage the readers as they target a wider audience therefore having to introduce different techniques of persuasion. For instance, The Guardian has to appeal to a mass audience therefore we took techniques that they use for their newspaper and website and tried to mirror these qualities.

A local newspaper primarily includes local news, so much so that to a certain extent a person who would read it not from that particular area will not understand some of the articles included. In contrast, tabloid newspapers such as The Times or The Guardian report on stories from all of the UK which will more than likely be seen on the news. Therefore I felt that it was necessary to introduce a balance between the two and create a ‘new’ approach by adding some stories from the national news but still having the main focus on local news. As a result all of our stories were in fact true and were based upon the main headlines in our area at the current moment in time. Therefore as a result I think this improved our newspaper as our content was more interesting and appealed to the audience by showing a range between the two forms of articles that being, local and national.   

As other successful newspapers do, we made sure that our newspaper was recognisable throughout our newspaper, website and poster. Therefore we used the same fonts, colour schemes, and titles throughout, showing the reader some familiarity and being able to distinguish the creator. For instance on all three ancillary tasks our masthead, ‘News Weekly’ was easily identifiable with it being in the same font and colour on all three pieces.

As a result I think our newspaper looks realistic and I think that we have taken different aspects from local and national papers to create a happy medium. Therefore we used selling points that would not usually be seen on a local paper. For instance on the right of our paper, we introduced a column that told the reader what would be included in the today’s paper, in my opinion this breaks the cover up and although takes some attention off the stories; creates more on the paper itself by showing more articles that the reader may be interested in. I think this is successful as it shows the balance between the two, on the other hand we have included advertisements that again break up the text and space, and show the reader it is a local newspaper with the advertising of local companies and events.    

Similarly we included these techniques with our website, although we feel this is our weakest part of our project. Critically we believe that the quality doesn’t match with the quality of our other tasks and is a very basic website in comparison to the websites we researched. Although we felt we tried to create the same style within ours we believe that if we had more of an understanding on the programme we used, it could definitely of been made better and to a higher standard. Although we did incorporate our stories and headlines from our paper and linked it with the website as this was the daily news for ‘News Weekly’. Also adding in our advertisements this coincided with our research on the websites and how The News Guardian includes adverts to further the interest to local businesses. Personally I think the advertisements detract attention away from the main aim of the stories, and therefore feel they are a waste of space. Although as this already works with local newspaper we k new we had to still use them.

The poster is a strong point of our overall project as, in my opinion, it is very detailed. It is different to any other posters people have seen and although we created it due  to our research, I feel it looks better than some posters which already exist for newspapers, and are definitely better than the headline poster boards that try to advertise the paper headlines. As we didn’t have much to compare our poster with we feel that it is a unique design and although can be seen as a cliché with the slogan of the poster, I believe that it links well with the base of our newspaper as we are located on the coast. As this differs from the simplistic approach of other posters that focus on the paper headline, more so than it does on the poster and newspaper. This is why we decided against this style, as we feel this advertises the newspaper the best way and is a lot more detailed to catch the eye of the audience. We believe that our poster therefore engages the audience more as with the slogan and image it makes the reader think of the meaning behind these giving their own personal opinion on our newspaper.  

How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

When implementing my project we tried to use a consistent colour scheme throughout all of our products. This worked well as it makes the products recognisable and showed the reader familiarity within our pieces of production. The use of blue, red and white was used as a result from the survey showed this to be the best option as it would engage the reader more as it was what most of them were looking for in local newspapers. As a result the blue also links with the location of our local newspaper, as this can be seen to mean the blue of the sea, relevant to Whitley Bay. The red therefore contrasts with the blue and therefore emphasises and highlights some areas of our work. Throughout we stuck with the same font of Georgia, and used the same titles and included them on all of our ancillary tasks. If I was to redo this project I would introduce a logo to our project that could be included on all of tasks to be more identifiable to the reader of the newspaper itself. Therefore our ancillary tasks are well linked between one another and with this combination from the website and poster, produce an effective approach to advertising our main task of the newspaper.  

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Predominantly expressing positive feelings and comments about our products, when asked to look at the products and compare them against other local newspapers and their products. On the whole, we received positive responses regarding our tasks and although the website was identified as our weakness in our project they felt that our newspaper and poster compensated for this as the majority of responses praised the originality of our poster and overall look of our front cover. Also the amount of detail we had taken into consideration didn’t come unnoticed, for instance our columns aligned with each other on both the front cover and the second page.

They seemed most interested by the introduction of national news, and although the subject matters of some of the articles wouldn’t necessarily focus on them as a target audience (as we asked classmates) they could see how the stories could be popular amongst other readers; therefore appealing to a mass audience.

Seemingly, a general categorisation of our newspaper has been made and our feedback was overall, surprisingly positive. Although we know there could be major improvements, we feel that for the website this was hindered through the programme we used.

How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

Predominantly using Microsoft Publisher, we created the plans and drafts for most of our tasks, later going on to make the final products. For instance our newspaper plans and final piece were created in Publisher. We were most definitely comfortable using this programme, as we have a lot of experience using this programme from an early age. We found it easy to manipulate the images, as well as using the range of text tools, for example creating columns in the text boxes. This is clearly a crucial point to the creation of a successful newspaper.

To research I used other local products where possible, as my goal was to create a local newspaper, a poster advertising it and a website coinciding with the paper. Therefore with the need to manipulate images for the poster we used Macromedia Fireworks, again comfortable with this programme and the editing of images and texts. For instance when making our paper boat we were able to cut out the background of the image to overlap it on the image of Whitley Bay lighthouse. The biggest task we faced was the website and using Microsoft Expression, this programme was new to us and we didn’t have the knowledge to take advantage of what was clearly a great programme. But with little knowledge we did the best we could and created a website that in my opinion lacked flare like our other pieces. With the previous research I think that this benefitted our work as we had preconceptions of what we needed to produce and although I am disappointed with our website I feel it still could be used as a local newspaper website as they are very basic when looking at our research.

When planning, we used ideas that we had found to be successful during researching different aspects of the tasks. We kept the target audience similar to that of the usual local newspapers and continued to orientate it towards this group. Although adding subjects that could be read by people of our age, with the introduction of the school story and the university fees article. We used this feature to enhance the range of audience trying to appeal to a wide range of people with the differentiation of stories. In doing so I think we have been successful and have allowed the current news, local and national, to be produced into one paper.