Evaluation

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

Our desired outcome for our final media products was to follow the codes and conventions of successful newspaper products to an extent however we decided to adopt a more unconventional approach in an attempt to target a broader, and younger, audience through our use of contemporary features.

The information from our audience questionnaires and research of other existing products suggested to us a successful route would be to undertake a more contemporary approach in order to target a broader audience. Our aim was to steer away from the typical older audience and appeal to a variety of different age groups with the aim of gaining a younger audience. To achieve this we challenged certain features. The style of font we used for our masthead and other headings was carefully selected over other fonts as we felt it contained certain distinctive edges on the lettering leaving an impression of clarity and through our choice of typography we play homage to websites that attract young audiences such as Facebook and Twitter. In some respect, this font is not what is expected as a typical font of a newspaper allowing our product a certain individuality whilst still looking professional.The masthead is kept similar to some extent; however we have chosen to include a logo which few newspapers include although some do, such as the Daily Echo. We found this effective so we chose to develop this form as it gives a sense of organisation to the masthead and the overall front cover whilst also holding positive connotations of the Poole area, namely the placement of the logo gives an impression of the dolphin jumping up as if its ambitious and determined.  Our primary image, although still the main feature on the page, is slightly smaller compared to primary images on existing newspapers because we wanted to feature a banner on our front cover so that another topic of interest was highlighted. We felt the two articles contrasted effectively as they both differ in content. Train fare increase contains a certain amount of political and economic content whereas the prom photo special is a personal interest article. The caption underneath our primary image is wrote in white text contrasted against the black box which is not a typical convention of a front cover as usually it is wrote in black text with no box surrounding it. We did this because we felt by only changing a minor feature on the front cover; it gave a subtle contemporary feel to the newspaper.

As a group, we decided to keep the overall layout of the newspaper the same, such as the main featured article with a primary image, this is because although we wanted our product to have a personal feel, we needed to make sure its overall appearance was professional and therefore taken seriously by our audience, failure to do this may have resulted in our product being confused with a magazine which is of course less formal than a newspaper and therefore we would not receive the broad audience we intended to target. We also kept out colour scheme to just the three main colours of black, white and blue this is because successful newspapers usually use three colours so that the page is not to cluttered and looks professional. These colours are also kept consistent throughout each newspaper to create a sense of familiarity to the audience so we felt this was a convention that could not be challenged if we wanted our product to be taken seriously as a successful local newspaper. The language on the front cover, and throughout our products, is kept formal and uses typical structures of articles for example we used quotes and named professionals. This is so that our product is clearly a newspaper and not confused with a magazine. By including advertisements on our front cover from local businesses in Poole we have shown explicitly that our newspaper is local, appealing to the local audience that want to keep updated on news from their area.

Throughout our products we have attempted to keep certain features consistent so the newspaper is recognisable to the audience and is kept professional as all the products correspond with each other, as existing newspapers do. For example, we used the same fonts for our products and the same colour scheme. The font we have used for all our articles is Times New Roman because it’s a basic font that looks typical of a font used for articles on newspaper and as because the audience is not attracted to the text first we wanted to keep it as simple as possible. We also wrote the author of the article and email address on our articles as well as ‘for more information go to www.dailypoole.co.uk’ as we found in our research that many successful newspapers do this, creating consistency.

In some respect we have applied particular forms of the structure of a newspaper page however mostly we wanted to steer away slightly from typical codes and conventions to achieve a contemporary feel to our newspaper. We have attempted to do so through our choice of font that it is kept consistent throughout our products and the use of an audience photo anchored into the main article. We have included one main article on our page to give a sufficient amount of information regarding the article with a primary image to compliment the article which uses codes and conventions as most newspapers do have a main article on the page. However, we also decided to use small articles of less interest on the left hand side of this page. Some newspapers do use short articles and we thought this was effective because it uses a variety of different topics of interest to appeal to different audiences and so we decided to use this convention.

During our research of radio jingles, it is apparent there are few radio jingles that are made to advertise newspapers making our product more difficult create in line with typical codes and conventions. However we did want to create a radio jingle as we felt that this would be an effective way to advertise our newspaper as a broad audience listens to the radio. We researched radio jingles advertising various products and businesses and used this as a rough guideline. We found the general structure and length of radio jingles and used this to develop our own jingle. So, by finding out that jingles nearly always incorporate music throughout, we spent time choosing appropriate music for our jingle. The voice over was kept short clear and catchy as this is typical of radio jingles to entice the audience into the jingle.

During the first attempt of creating our poster we over complicated the product by adding an image at the bottom which challenged the conventions of typical newspaper posters excessively because they are kept simplistic. So for the poster we decided to use the codes and conventions by simply using our masthead at the top so the poster is easily recognisable as corresponding to our newspaper, an engaging headline in a bold font ‘RAIL TRAVEL: IS THIS THE END?’ we decided to use a rhetorical question and over dramatised the nature of the article to engage our audience making them want to read more. We also included ‘WIN THORPE PARK TICKETS’ to appeal to our audience with the use of a possibility of free items; this is linked to our front cover to create consistency.

Overall, we believe that we have used certain codes and conventions for some aspects of our products however by challenging some codes and conventions, we have created a contemporary product to fulfil our main aim in engaging younger readers to our product as from our research we concluded that the percentage of people over 65 who read newspaper is 78% whereas the percentage of people from 15 to 24 who read newspapers is only 48%.

How effective is the combination of your main products and ancillary tasks?

The combination of our main product and our ancillary tasks is highly effective in achieving our aim to target a broad audience due to the consistency throughout our products and the familiarity they give by creating a relationship between them.

The fonts and colour scheme used on our front cover, newspaper page and poster are kept consistent throughout to create familiarity to our products whilst also giving professionalism by creating a relationship between them. We have also included the masthead at the top of each product so the product is easily recognisable to the audience from a first glance and in our jingle we have made sure to include our newspaper name ‘Daily Poole’ at the beginning and end so it is the first and last thing they hear. It was important to keep these features consistent to make sure our newspaper was taken seriously and appear effectively as a successful newspaper. We have also attempted to include a variety of different topics in our articles on our front cover and on the next page of our newspaper to gain a broad audience as different articles will appeal to different people. We believe the combination of political and economical topics are contrasted effectively with the personal interest articles so we have kept this balance consistent in all of our products.

Our poster is effective in complimenting our main product because we have created a relationship between the two products by linking the rail travel article and the Thorpe park ticket competition. This is effective as if the audience see the poster and wish to buy the newspaper from this they will be expecting to see the article advertised on the poster to be on the front cover as well as the Thorpe park ticket competition and both features are presented on the front cover clearly for the reader to see. A poster is an effective way in enticing new audiences to buy the newspaper because it features a new article each day and will appeal to different types of people depending on their topics of interest. This will hopefully gain a more reliably consistent audience.

Our radio jingle is likely to reach a broad audience due to the variety of different age groups that engage in the radio. Older generations are likely to listen to the radio, perhaps whilst travelling as it is convenient and they will come across the jingle of our newspaper. Also through the use of a digital format, a younger audience are likely to come across the jingle and are more likely to investigate into purchasing a hard copy of their local newspaper because they feel as if it has something to offer to them due to the more modern way of advertising it. This is effective in enticing a variety of age groups into buying our newspaper with an increased possibility of gaining regular readers. We have made sure to create a relationship between the jingle and the newspaper by including the headlines of the articles featured  for example the rail travel article is found on the front cover and the gardening competition is featured on the left side third of our newspaper page.

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Firstly, feedback from our audience questionnaires strongly influenced the decisions we made during the creation of our newspaper hopefully giving us a more professional outcome. We asked the audience if they regularly visit newspaper websites and the majority of responses were ‘no’ therefore this cemented our decision to create a radio jingle instead and hopefully gain a broader audience due to the wide range of age groups that listen to the radio. We also asked if the audience like keeping up with local events and the majority of the participants said ‘yes’ and this influenced our decision to use the train fare and slow construction articles. Although these articles may not be seen as being exciting news, it is local news so therefore we were restricted on topics we could write about. We wanted to make sure the articles we used were believable and if we used something such as a murder (one of our original ideas) our newspaper may have appeared as more of a national newspaper rather than local.

We also created a second questionnaire to gain a deeper understanding of what the audience expected from a newspaper and this influenced our decisions further. We asked the audience what features they find most important and what features they pay attention to the most and unsurprisingly, the most popular response was ‘local news’ and therefore we created a higher proportion of local news and events compared to sports, weather and reviews. We also asked the participants how they gain knowledge of local newspapers and two of the highest responses were ‘newsagent’s boards’ and ‘the radio’ and therefore we created a poster and a radio jingle with the intention of creating successful advertisements to entice readers to buying our newspaper and we believe that these products were successful by looking at our audience feedback.

We decided as a group to use a variety of questionnaires and structured interviews to obtain our audience feedback. We each asked ten people a variety of questions, so altogether had thirty sets of results to analyse which we thought was sufficient to gain a good understanding of how our products were received. All participants were asked to answer the questions honestly because we wanted to see what we could have done to improve our products and what was successful. We chose to present our results on pie charts as this was a clear way for us to compare our results and come to conclusions about how successful we had been in creating our products.

As shown on our pie charts, the majority of participants did think out products were professional looking as 88% said yes for the front cover, 73% said yes for the next page and 60% said yes for the jingle. We were generally pleased with this outcome however by investigating more deeply into the audiences responses we discovered some improvements we could of made.

By looking at the results for the front cover, we could see that the highest percentage of people thought that the headlines and the masthead were the most professional feature however, participants thought that we could have included more enticing articles and more sport articles. so we have learned that we needed to include more appealing articles to gain a broader audience. Originally, we were going to include a sports article on the banner of our front cover however the images we wanted to use were not engaging and professional enough to be used so we replaced this article.We have learned to take more time planning the type of photographs that are required to be effective on a newspaper. For example, by studying camera shots in more detail.

Although participants did give positive feedback by saying that the jingle was memorable and they did enjoy it because it was 'catchy', we did get some negative feedback. For example, participants said the voice wasn't clear enough and it was too long. We came to the conclusion that not enough time was spent on making sure the the radio jingle was professional enough compared to the front cover, the page inside the newspaper and the poster. This is because we felt the newspaper itself was more important in looking professional and believed that the poster was more effective in gaining a broader audience due to the fact that they are conveniently placed outside local shops for the public to pass by day to day. However, we have learned that we should spend equal amounts of attention on all products as the radio jingle could have a positive effect on the audience and gain a broader readership. We also had difficulties with technology whilst creating the jingle because we were not used to the software so to solve this we should of researched more into how to use the software to perhaps gain a more effective outcome.

Overall, we were happy with how the audience received our product and we have been enlightened on how to make our products more effective and professional. Our results are presented in pie charts with a brief analysis of what we have learned below.

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

The majority of our research was typed out on Microsoft Word documents because they look presentable on the page and it is easy to differentiate between each piece of research we carried out however we also used a wide variety of different media technologies to make our research more aesthetically pleasing on our blog whilst providing us a variety of presentation skills that were useful for the creation of our final products. We used Prezzi to present some of our information that would otherwise have been too long and wasn't as easy to present on a Word document as effectively as other parts of our research. So, we created a Prezzi for existing newspapers and the history of newspapers. Our research includes a large number of definitions and facts to broaden our knowledge on newspapers so we used screenshots of websites and then analysed our findings below. This is to show clearly what we learned from the information we gathered from the websites. As part of our research, we wanted to research the Rupert Murdoch scandal and we felt an effective way to do this was to watch documentaries on the subject to gain our knowledge. We also watched a video on how successful jingles are created as our knowledge was limited and we found this helped with the creation of our jingle. Furthermore, we felt the best way to research newspaper posters would be to go out and take photos of posters for our local newspaper, The Daily Echo. This is because, there was a limited number of posters on the internet and we wanted to analyse as many posters as possible.

Our planning took a fairly similar structure to our research because we wanted to keep our information consistently presentable. Therefore, we used a high number of Word documents to convey our information. However, we explored more media technologies because we wanted to gain the skills to make our final products look as professional as possible. We took photos of our time management, such as our 'to do lists' and also, because we used social networking to communicate as a group we screenshotted texts and Facebook conversations to show our organisation skills. We also used emails on the school system to communicate with the music teachers at our school to see if we could hire out a room to record our jingle.We used these different mediums because they were convenient in making sure our planning ran smoothly.To take the photos for our newspaper, we used a high quality camera and took a variety of different photos using different camera shots and angles to compare and contrast the photos to determine which photos were the most effective. To choose an appropriate font for our masthead and headlines, we used font websites because there is a wide range of fonts to choose from which gave as many possibilities to pick a font that would look the most effective on our products. To monitor our progress through the creation of our artifacts, we carried out a focal group discussion and presented the information on Powerpoint as each question could be shown clearly on a different slide for us to use in the creation of our final products.

The two main media technologies we used  to create our final products were Photoshop and Garageband which we used on a Macbook. We found the two software's to have a wide variety of tools we required to create successful and professional looking products. Before we decided to use Photoshop, we used Paint and Serif Draw Plus but we found that both of these software's were not professional enough and did not have the tools we needed to create our products to a high enough standard. Although Garageband was an effective software for creating a jingle, we did not have enough time to study the software and therefore we did not fully understand how to use it so our jingle was not as professional as we had hoped.

I didn't use as an excessive number of media technologies for my evaluation as I wanted the answers to my questions to appear as clear as possible on the page to make each question easy to read. However, we decided to present our audience feedback on Microsoft Powerpoint and create graphs on Microsoft Excel. This is because by creating pie charts it is clear to compare the results and by presenting them on Powerpoint we could  put separate graphs on separate slides so the information was easy to read and use to answer our audience feedback question.

Overall, we were pleased with the end result of our newspaper products and we have improved our skills throughout the project immensely.