Evaluation

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

Newspaper

Since I was creating a local newspaper, I decided that this newspaper should only contain local news and not have any celebrity gossip or news from other areas of the country or world such as The Sun and The Independent newspapers have. Doing this would make my paper similar to other newspapers which I had set out to do in the first place.

I made sure that my articles were based around the North Tyneside are so all the text could be classed as local news and if somebody from another part of the country were to read it, they may not be able to make sense of some of the text.

As any other newspaper does I included the name of my newspaper, ‘Weekly Knowledge’ on all my pieces of work. Doing this would give my newspaper an identity that would become more and more recognisable as time went by

The use of space and planning on my newspaper pages is definitely one of the strengths of these two pieces as all the planning I did allowed me to easily fit things together in a way that did not make the pages look over crowded but also so that the page was not wasting any space. The planning also allowed me to have my main story from my front cover continue onto the next page as many top newspapers do, for me this was a must to do as it gave my paper that professional feel about it.

Having the date and price near the top of the page of the front cover was also a priority as this makes it easily accessible for the reader but it makes the paper look more realistic as well.

One thing I would criticise about my work is that the images I used were not the greatest or most eye catching, so to improve I would use more interesting and maybe more graphic pictures.

Website

I would say that the website is one of the weaker parts of my project as the software I was using to create the piece I was new to and struggled with on certain aspects. However I made my website similar to other local websites that I had viewed as they all seemed to use the same basic layout and techniques.

I had my headlines listed and they sent you to a different page to view the entire article which you had clicked on, I got this idea from the other sites.

I kept my mast head and the options bar at the top of every page as this makes the piece look very professional but also helps create the name as a brand name for newspapers.

It was important to have the date at the top of the website as it is important for any website displaying news to show when the news occurred so that it can be judged whether it is up to date or not.

Poster

Finding local newspapers that had posters advertising them proved impossible so I had to use national newspapers posters and results from my survey to create my own posters.

I created two different newspapers as both my research into other posters and my audience research with my survey came up with two different styles of poster, one using familiar scenery so that the poster and paper instantly get recognised as local, and the other poster to display an unusual image to grab the readers eye and make them analyse the full poster to see what it is about. I think that I managed to do both of these quite well as I used a very recognisable image for my first poster then I used an unusual image that not many people see on a day to day basis but making it still tie in with my newspaper theme.

The posters I analysed used very little text on them so I tried to mimic this technique however I feel that I did not put enough text onto the poster so it is not as effective as it could have been.

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

Throughout my project I kept the same colour patterns throughout, I used a blue and white style on all my work so that it could all be tied together and these colours help link the newspaper to whitley Bay which is an area in North Tyneside.

I feel that my newspaper is very strong and well put together and with having my poster and website containing the same core things such as the mast head and colour techniques I believe that it helps strengthen my project overall.

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

From those that have seen my project I have had positive feedback especially directed at my actual newspaper pages as they thought it looked very realistic and professional.

Each person that has viewed my project lives locally so they all recognised the content of each of my pieces. On the posters there were mixed decisions about which poster was better as some liked the thought of keeping the image local but others like the random image to catch the eye.

The website received mixed feedback also as some people thought that the pages could have used a bit more detail (me included) and others thought that they looked good and would be simple to use which is a positive for any website.

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

To hold all my work on my project from the research to the planning to the production and evaluation I have used blogger which is entirely new to me as I am used to submitting coursework in on hardcopies by hand or by displaying all of my work on Microsoft OneNote. At times this proved difficult to use as the school network system had blocked the blogger website and my internet connection at home isn’t very reliable, but I have managed to get all of my work uploaded how I wanted it to be done so.

For the newspaper pages I mainly used Microsoft Publisher as I am used to using this when designing and producing pieces of work as it is very simple to use and can create interesting effects on texts and images which is vital when creating a newspaper. I also used Microsoft Word to create my newspaper articles that I included in my pieces.

The posters were entirely created on Microsoft Publisher as I have been using this software for many years now and feel confident enough to produce a poster on it. Publisher is a design software that helps to manipulate and edit images and text which is perfect for a poster

For the website I used Microsoft Web which is software based entirely upon website designing which was exactly what I was doing. I used Publisher again for parts of this task to create things that I was going to include on the pages of the website.

For the research stages I used the internet to find information on the other local newspapers and was able to see how their finished products looked giving me an idea of what mine should be like. I also used surveys for this stage as it helped me get first hand information on the exact questions that I wanted.

All my plans were put onto Publisher to manipulate and edit as easily as possible and all texts were typed on Word before they were applied to any other software so that I knew the spelling and sentence structure was all correct.