Evaluation

Evaluation

Harry Carpenter

30044578

Introduction For my media project this year we have been studying existing, and producing our

own local newspaper. We also had to produce a website for the newspaper and a poster. After some

research into the Existing newspaper publications in my area I discovered that there is only really one newspaper that covers the whole of Portsmouth and almost holds a monopoly over the local coverage in my area with very little competition.

Due to this I think that there is a lot of opportunity to introduce a new newspaper into

my local area and that it could do with one that is less heavy on advertising and promoting things like the local football club as most of the coverage in my existing local newspaper is.

Due to these reasons I think that the introduction and development of a new media product during our A2 course is a good idea as it capitalizes on a gap in the marketplace and allows for a good new newspaper to place into circulation.

It also allows for certain media conventions to be played with in order to provide something different.

Introduction Audience The typical age range for a local newspaper, like the one that we are making for

our A2 course, is around 17 upwards. This is because, at this age, young people are starting to take an interest in their

local area and also politics and issues in the news. Obviously people older than this in the ages 20 to 30 are even more likely to

read a local newspaper as they will most probably be working in the local area and or living independently in the area covered by the newspaper.

This also applies fairly well for the age group above this as well for example the 30 through to 50 ranges as they would be in much the same position, however they are probably more likely to have families and would be concerned with issues involving for example their children in the newspaper.

This is the type of readership that the community page on my website is targeting. This page would provide stories involving only local areas and people and would be of great interest to people with families and people who live in Portsmouth.

Introduction Location My newspaper would cover the area

between Farlington on the right of the map and Porchester on the left.

I have decided to cover this area with my newspaper as I have looked at what newspapers are already available in this area and there are not may to choose from.

The News is the most popular local newspaper in Portsmouth. It offers a wide variety of stories and coverage from what is happening in and around the city such as events and performances to top headline stories to sport and weather.

I would aim to cover this area as it is slightly smaller than that covered by the Portsmouth News as it does not include Gosport and Havant bringing a more local touch to mine.

In what ways does your media product use,

develop or challenge forms and conventions

of real media products?

Use of contemporary media conventions in my project.

I have used some conventions of the contemporary newspaper in my project. I have used things such as a masthead and columns and organised them in a standard newspaper style. I have done this as I think that there is no need to reorganise the basic layout of a newspaper as the layout most people are familiar with works well and allows information to be read easily and quickly by the reader.

Columns

Headline

Picture

Masthead

Advert

Use of contemporary media conventions in my project. Colour Colour is very important when creating any new

newspaper to introduce into the current market. The use of colour is key in the forming of a brand for the newspaper. The colour scheme of any newspaper is what distinguishes it from the competition and defines its own place within the range of similar products on the market.

When choosing the colours for my newspaper I tried to keep a modern, contemporary and uncluttered style by using fewer neutral colours. I went for a tonal mix of blues, greys and yellows in order to give a professional and understated look to my newspaper.

I have actually used more yellow on the front page of the newspaper and less inside due to the fact that this is the brightest of my colours used. I think that it is perfect for use on the front cover as it is eye catching and would attract people to it but once they look inside I have used softer colours so that the newspaper and text is easier to read.

Brand You need to firmly establish a brand with any new newspaper to allow it to compete

and become a well known paper. After looking at other existing contemporary newspapers on sale today in the United kingdom one thing that becomes apparent is that they are all very unique in their branding and ethos.

They all have specific styles of presentation and all have specific points of view and morals built into them.

I have used the logo of my paper to create the branding for it. As you can see I have used the logo on the front page of the newspaper, on the website and on the poster. This is because these are the initial points of contact that people will have with the different elements of my newspaper. The home web page, the front cover and the poster have to immediately inform people which newspaper they are looking at and this is how I have started to establish an identity for the newspaper.


Journalistic style In my paper I have used a similar writing style to most other journalistic media outlets. This is the

‘who, what, where, why and when?’ technique. I have also used the inverted triangle technique that I looked at during the pre production stage of my project. If you click on this link it will take you to the page where I talk about the inverted triangle and its effects. (http://harrycarpenterjournalismnewspaper.blogspot.com/2010/09/human-interest.html). I think that this method of writing is a good convention of journalism to maintain within my newspaper as it delivers the important parts of a story to the reader very quickly in the early stages of the story.


The issue of junk mail is one

that annoys us all, daily.

However Portsmouth City

Council are thinking of placing

restrictions upon this type of

mailing. Many businesses such

as fast food restaurants and

double-glazing companies post

leaflets and posters through

doors in order to advertise

directly and freely into the

home.

What

WhoWhere

Why

Adverts Adverts are key to local newspapers success and are present in pretty much every

local newspaper as I discovered after doing some research into papers in my local area. Many smaller local newspapers have to include advertising as they need the funding from selling space in the newspaper to keep printing.

Advertising for local stores and business as well may also increase the reputation of the newspaper in the area as they would probably be willing to promote the newspaper in return for advertising space in the paper.

I have not taken a particular agenda with the advertising in my paper as I think that this is too controlling of what people read and look at and does not reflect the open, liberal community tone of my newspaper.


Adverts The advertising standards agency is a group that ensures all advertising used in the

UK is suitable to the public and is legal and compliant with government restrictions. On the ASA’s website it states that: Making sure that consumers are not misled,

harmed or offended by ads helps to maintain consumer confidence in advertising. Advertising that is welcomed by consumers is good for business.

It maintains a level playing field amongst businesses. It is important to the rules of fair competition that all advertisers play to the same rules.

I have taken these restrictions into account when creating the adverts for my paper as it is imperative to abide by these regulations in order to avoid costs in court for breaking them.


Photography Pretty much all of the photography in contemporary local newspapers is human

interest orientated. This means that all of the stories and photography revolve around people and stories within the area of the newspaper or about people in general. Modern local newspapers are built upon the idea of human interest as people buy them to read about what is happening in their local area.

Due to this aspect I have made a conscious decision to only include photographs that are local to my newspaper and involve people in the local area .


Website My newspaper also has a corresponding website to go with it. Pretty much every

contemporary newspaper has a website. The website for a newspaper is a great way to expand the availability of access to my newspaper for people who wish to read and buy my paper. I have used the website in a similar manner to other contemporary newspapers as I have used it as another platform to deliver stories and pieces of news to people who visit the website.

I also have a community page on the website. This page is intended to only strictly involve people and stories from Portsmouth, whereas the other pages and stories may come from a little further afield. I think that this is a nice idea and would make readers from the centre of Portsmouth feel a lot more involved and make them feel that it is a paper aimed directly at them and cares about them.


How does my newspaper challenge current media conventions?

Adverts I have gone for much more simple advertising in my newspaper. This is because I did

not want the newspaper to feel advertising heavy. I also did not want any of the advertising in my newspaper to detract from the photography or the stories.


This is an example of two adverts for the same company. The one on the left is the one that I re designed for my newspaper and the other is one that the company themselves designed. As you can see my one is a lot more simplistic and minimal and I think I looks a lot more classy and professional. It is also a lot less garish and detracts from the rest of the page on the website a lot less.

Poster All new products need advertising in order to be launched successfully into the UK

market due to the fact that it is an extremely busy one and there are already hundreds of products out there. It is also key in starting to forge an identity and branding in the contemporary market.

Whilst doing some research into existing local newspapers I found that many do not use posters to advertise their newspapers. They usually use magazines, local radio and television networking but many overlook posters. This is where my project challenges conventions as I have designed a poster in order to advertise my newspaper.


As you can see I have simply used a photograph that i took of Southsea castle in Portsmouth and then added my newspaper’s logo and some small taglines.

I think that this poster would be extremely effective in capturing people’s attention as it is simple and contains bold primary colour.

How effective is the combination of my main product and its ancillary texts? I think that the combination of my main product and ancillary texts is extremely

effective as it allows me to increase the output of my newspaper over several media platforms. This allows me to give readers more access to my newspaper more often allowing them feel more involved with the paper and increasing the sense of community relationship with the newspaper.

These ancillary texts also help to increase the brand power of my newspaper by allowing my newspaper to be accessed from the Internet as well. Therefore people can access parts of my newspaper from home allowing them to achieve a greater sense of involvement with the newspaper.

I have also maintained a colour scheme across my main product and ancillary texts. This is effective as it increases the sense of identity across all the outlets of my newspaper and helps to cut my newspaper its own identity within the market. This is important as without an identity there is nothing to establish my paper and therefore it cannot start to build a loyal readership.

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

My use of the ancillary tasks in my newspaper is typical of contemporary media conventions in the same field. As you can see I have maintained a blue based colour scheme though out my project piece including the ancillary texts to help create the sense of identity that I talked about earlier.

As you can see I have included the newspaper logo on all three key areas. The logo is on the front page of the paper, the home page of the website and the Poster. This is because these are the first points of viewing that an audience will have with my paper and they need to be given the title and brand straight away.

The combination of my main product and the ancillary texts is very effective. This is due to the fact that I have produced a strong network for my newspaper using the website and poster. Using these items people who enjoyed reading my newspaper would be able to get more than simply what was covered in each issue, they would be able to go online and discover more stories and find ones specifically about their local area.

My main project and accompanying pieces are also very effective as they produce a much more professional feel for my newspaper. If I had tried to launch a newspaper in the current period and did not use other features such as a website I think that people would see the newspaper as inferior and think that it was not as well thought out as a competitor that uses several media outlets to talk to its audience.

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

How did I use new media technology in the construction, research, planning and evaluation stages?

I have used new media technologies in the entire production of my media project. This is because I feel that in order to present a media product that Is acceptable in a contemporary market and would be able to look professional and meet the publics expectations a newspaper must be produced using an up to date and advanced computer programme.

The programmes that I used in order to create my media product were the following: in Design, Photoshop, I Web, Blogger and PowerPoint


How did I use new media technology in the construction, research, planning and evaluation stages? In Design I used In Design a lot during my

project as it is one of the most easy and practical programmes for designing publications like a newspaper.

I used In Design to create the front page, inside page and poster for my project. The benefits of using the same programme for each of these pieces was that it was easy to hold a uniform look across the main parts of the project and the ancillary texts as all of the same colours, shapes and effects were available to use on each piece.

How did I use new media technology in the construction, research, planning and evaluation stages? Photoshop I used Photoshop several times during my

project but not as the main tool for design. I used In Design rather than Photoshop because it allows much greater freedom for design and is a lot easier to use effectively to create something like a newspaper. However I did use Photoshop to adapt images that I took so that they could be used to the best of their potential in my project. We had to use only images and photographs that we had taken ourselves during the project. This meant that a programme allowing the adaptation of these images was essential and Photoshop was extremely useful for this, as you can see below I used the pen tool on Photoshop in order to draw around the figure seen here and then cut it out and insert it into In Design to add it to my newspaper.

How did I use new media technology in the construction, research, planning and evaluation stages? PowerPoint I used PowerPoint in order to create my

evaluation for my media project. I used PowerPoint as it allowed me to present a staged and gradual presentation and step by step analysis of the evaluation questions.

We were told that we had to present an interesting evaluative piece to talk about our project and answer the questions, we were not allowed to simply write an essay as this doesn’t really show and technological and IT knowledge.

PowerPoint allows easy organisation of slides and easy manipulation of information and images, there are also a wide array of layouts and colour schemes available allowing a professional look to be gained easily.

Slide Share I used Slide Share in order to present my evaluation PowerPoint and put it

on my blog as you cannot upload Presentations directly to the blog. It was very easy to use and allowed me to keep all my work together on the

blog making it easily accessible.


Blogger I used Blogger to maintain a step y step commentary on my project and to

show the production story of my A2 project. It is very easy to use and makes it simple to display all work done and

allows easy examination of my work.


Conclusion I think that this project turned out very well and really demonstrated my confidence and skill when

using the programmes on the imac. The project also demonstrated my confidence and skill level when using a digital camera as we had to take all of our photographs ourselves.

Once I got to grips with how the programmes worked it was relatively straight forward to produce the main project and accompanying pieces as the programmes were very user friendly and did not take much long winded practise to be able to use well.

One of the problems was the fact that the programmes we had at college were not available on my computer at home even though it was a Mac. This meant that at times progress on the work was slow as I could only work on the actual project during the two hour lesson on a Monday, however due to the availability of the blogger format and also Microsoft Word on my computer at home I could write the stories to go on the pages and keep my blog up to date.

I think that my final product is a good indication of my level of skill when using the programmes I have talked about within this presentation. I think that I have produced a professional looking newspaper and have also showed good level of skill in my creativity and artistic styling in my newspaper as well. The colour scheme that I have chosen and implemented across my main product and ancillary texts demonstrates this well.

Overall I think that this project has developed my use of the programmes I have talked about already and has also developed my understanding of how modern newspapers are created and how they fit in to a contemporary media market. I believe that I have created a good standard of work and I believe that I have demonstrated my design and production skill well within this project.

Evaluation

Education

Transcript of Evaluation