For our A2 media project the assignment was to create one main product which was 2 pages of a newspaper, and two ancillary products, including a poster for the newspaper and two hyperlinked pages for the papers website.
In order to begin my work I had to come up with a target audience I would be basing my project for. I decided after doing some research that there is a gap in the market for a teen/young adult newspaper. I decided to focus on people aged 16-25, the chosen target audience is relevant to the topic because the intension is to distribute the newspaper and advertise the website in and around Southend College/University. I then needed to come up with a title that would represent it. I decided I wanted something that my target audience would like and that would draw attention to it, for example more bold and young rather than conventional. The title I ended up deciding on was ‘Southends Hot Gossip’. I decided on this because it is out of the norm and is something someone of that age group would appreciate. It’s short, bold, out there and daring. Here is the completed look for the title and I think the colours represent the title well and in the same way.
The ways in which my media project uses the forms and conventions of real media products is that in order to make them look specialized I needed to base my work on real media products for them to look professional and realistic. Firstly I started with my newspaper. The brief states to create 2 pages for it, but due to the newspaper being such a big part of the project I decided to design a third page to include all the things I couldn’t fit on the first two. It seemed too little to just do two pages and I thought three would be more appropriate and tie it together better. The way I began to use other media products to develop my own was to look through firstly tabloid newspapers such as ‘The Sun’ and ‘The Daily Express’ and ‘The Star’ , then I moved on to broadsheets like ‘The Times’ and ‘The Guardian’. After looking at these popular and large scale newspapers, I condensed the study down to local newspapers only as this is what my newspaper will be. I looked at ‘The Evening Echo’ ‘The Yellow Advertiser’ and ‘The Metro’. All the layout and content varied in different ways with the newspapers, however I felt my newspaper challenged these because although mine is officially a local newspaper, it challenges the forms and conventions as it sticks to a very tabloid style, such as the bold colours, print and layout however it incorporates local news with tabloid also. The reason for doing this was mainly because I wanted the readers to have a variation of content to read about and not feel like they should need to pick up copies of different media in order to get the mix they would want out of it. With my newspaper they are able to read about local news as well as the main stories tabloid articles would cover. In order to create my newspaper pages I used a programme called Adobe Indesign. The software was quite easy to get the hang of but it took a few weeks to be able to use it without demonstrations however.
Here is the finished product of my newspaper:
With my website which I done secondly, I again looked at the same newspapers above websites to look at their layout and the way their website was designed. I decided again that between local newspapers websites and tabloid/broadsheets, the tabloid and broadsheets looked by far the best in terms of professionalism and content/layout. As you can see below I have compared local newspaper ‘The Echo’ with tabloid newspaper ‘The Sun’ and in my opinion the one that looks better is obvious. Out of the two I decided that as a young student I would much rather log on to something that looked like the tabloid version compared with the local as it just looks so much more interesting and bold compared to the plain layout of ‘The Echoes’ layout.
In order to create my website I used a programme called Macromedia Dreamweaver 8. The programme was very well suited to our task we had to carry out and it was simple to create our pages. A lot of the work was done through Photoshop also as there were things that were quite restrictive creatively on Dreamweaver. Overall I really liked the programme however and would use it again for something like this.
Thirdly the last piece of the project to complete was a poster for the new newspaper. As you can see above I used Adobe Photoshop again to create my poster. I found Photoshop very difficult to use at first, the programme is hard to get the hang of and with only one teacher to a whole class it’s hard to get your turn to be taught what you need to do. After a few weeks of using the programme however it gets easier and easier and by this point I can probably do anything on there to an extent. I decided to stay with the bright eye-catching colour scheme all the way through the products; firstly because I wanted to stick within a common theme and layout therefore people would recognise the ‘Hot Gossip’ colours but secondly because I wanted it to convey what teenagers and young adults would relate to. If I had chosen dull colours students wouldn’t have responded as well in my opinion. Some of this is backed up by my audience feedback which I will discuss later.
I couldn’t do much research on posters for newspapers as they were quite hard to come across. I could only get secondary research from the internet instead of finding it primarily. In a way my poster challenges the forms and conventions because it is unlike one I have seen before but that is the point. I want it to be different and outstanding so it will draw attention to it more.
Here is the finished product of my poster, as you can see it is very eye catching and bold like the rest of my work and I am very pleased with how it turned out.
I believe the combination of my main product and ancillary texts are very effective because in order for the products to work well together you need to combine a common theme throughout the media for example by looking at the evening echo it is apparent that the same colours for the newspaper are used on the website, as well as a common style throughout. I believe this is important for the public to identify your media with and if there is a theme it is easy for the audience to know that the work is clearly of the same genre and mode. For example throughout my work I stuck to the colour scheme of pink yellow black and white. I chose these colours after experimenting with others to see what suited the style of my work the best. In the end I chose these because they worked well together to create the fresh bold look I was going for. An audience will now relate my work as a whole for hot gossip when they see these particular colours; this is how a media product gains recognition and an identity of its own. This becomes very important when it comes to main factors such as marketing and distribution.
For my audience feedback I asked 50 people within the target audience to answer a series of questions about my newspaper. Here are the results:
1. Would you frequently pick up copies of Hot Gossip if they are easy to access?
2. Do you like the way the local newspaper carries the tabloid style?
3.Would you rather see more local news or world news?
4. Do you like the colour scheme of the media product?
5.What do you think a young person like yourself believes are the most important parts of the newspaper for you to identify it with ? Layout-15 headline-20 Colour Scheme-9 Content- 6
As you can see I got a good insight to what the people I am creating the media product for want and this really helped with editing aspects of my product to meet the requirements of the public. It was really interesting to get the public’s view and find out what I could do to connect them with the product better. I found it quite surprising that they believe the headline is most important to the newspaper followed by the layout. But again this makes sense as the headline is a vital part of the products identity and the layout is something readers will become familiar with.
I used media technologies in the construction, research, planning and evaluation stages by focusing it around Adobe Indesign and Photoshop as well as Macromedia Dreamweaver 8 to document all I was doing. I felt our class was very underprivileged when it came to the availability of the technology within our college .Both other media classes were able to work on Apple Mac computers while our class had to stick to PC’s. Because the software we were using to design our products were better suited for the Macs , when it came to uploading work to them sometimes it would have to be resized due to the difference in computers. Also on the Macs you are able to have a clear view of what you were doing and the software was quicker and more modern versions were on them compared to the computers our class were given. They were very slow and the work became more time consuming because of this.I feel we were given a big disadvantage and if we were to do this project again I would require Mac’s for everyone as when we were able to use them after college at night when they were available we found they were so much better suited to the project and quicker and more efficient to use. I also think because the project is so time consuming we could of got a lot more better quality work done if we had more time for practical lessons and less theory. In comparison we had 1 practical to 2 theory lessons a week that was unnecessary. Practical was very much needed and with only one teacher to see a week it became quite a big problem in getting one on one time with them.
All of the photos used throughout my media project I have taken myself specifically for the media project that you can see below through the planning stages of my work. I had to take these in my own time outside of college or at events I wanted to write about.
In conclusion if I was to do this project again I would make sure I got a lot more work done given the time scale we had to do it in. However I am happy with my final product and feel like I met the requirements of the brief to the best of my ability given the circumstances of the software we were given. I enjoyed doing this project, it was good to get a chance to learn how to use the programmes such as adobe Photoshop and indesign properly as they are good to know how to use if we had to deal with it again and I am glad I had the opportunity.
