3) What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

Audience feedback was crucial in the creation of all my products. I mainly used the social networking site Facebook for my audience feedback and also asked my fellow peers and friends what they thought of my products whilst I was in the creative process. An example of a time when I thought audience feedback was extremely beneficial was in the early stages of my front page production. I posted a picture of my front page on Facebook and asked my friends to leave constructive criticism. Below is a screenshot of a few of the comments.

Most of the comments addressed the same issues, such as: The size of the font in the story, the sparsity of the bottom right corner and the border around the story. In addition they all seemed to like my main logo and adverts. After this audience feedback I subsequently changed these issues and repeated the process.

This audience feedback suggests that my audience is active and not easily brainwashed. This goes against the hypodermic syringe theory which takes a negative view of how the media affects it's audience, suggesting that the audience is passive and easily manipulated. Clearly my audience has commented on the quality of my story and appearance of my newspaper, therefore they are taking an active interest in the production and content of the local media. My audience commented on my products in relation to 'the need to be informed' and if they were not satisfied with the story they would tell me what they disliked about it, knowing that I would alter it.

My radio ad received a massive amount of positive feedback, so I was extremely pleased that I didn't have to change anything. As for my poster, I simply showed my peers in media and asked them to rate it on a scale of 1-10. I gathered a considerable number of results and the average score for my poster was 6.5. After this I went back to the drawing board and repeated the process until my average score was raised to 8. Once this was achieved I consulted my teacher on what he thought would make my poster more effective, and made changes accordingly. This method of rating and repeating was extremely effective in refining my poster until I was happy with the end product. Surprisingly my poster was originally very complex, but through this filtering system it gradually got more and more simplified. From this I learnt that advertisements need to be simple and bold to draw attention rather than being crammed full of information.

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

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

Radio script

This is the script for my radio advert. I decided to emphasise the fact it is a local newspaper by having a 'posh' - well spoken person talking in the beginning, discussing typical things you would hear in a national newspaper. Then to contrast I had someone with a strong Liverpool accent butt in, which leads to a series of people talking about what they want from a local newspaper. At the end I decided to bring back the posh voice just as a bit of humour and also because it is easier to understand than the other voices, so it is required when advertising the actual name of the newspaper. I think I will have music and some sound effects added in after I have recorded the voice but I have not planned it as of yet. When I work with sound I like to just mess around with everything until I find something I like rather than sticking to a fixed plan.

Designing and justifying my adverts on the inside page

For my basic pinky coloured advert I took the idea from a newspaper I read at home. It was a small advert at the side of the page which filled roughly the same space as mine and was extremely simplistic yet effective. I chose to do a simple side banner advert as my page has 5 pictures on already and I thought adding any more to my adverts would be abit excessive. My orange PPI advert actually took a bit of research! I always see adverts on T.V and in newspapers talking about PPI compensation so I decided it would be logical to add in mine. I found out how to know if you have been mis sold PPI on this website:
http://www.which.co.uk/campaigns/personal-finance/the-ppi-campaign/mis-sold-ppi/
I basically took the information, put it into my own words and added it to my advert.

Pictures for my inside page

I spent a day walking around Maghull and taking pictures for my inside page. I have created all of my adverts and stories so all I need to do now is add my pictures and add some finishing details. My story involved a police station, a train station and a bridge, so naturally I took pictures of all of these locations. It was tricky getting pictures of the police station as when I took out my camera and started snapping a policeman came out and began to question me on what I was doing and asked if I was taking part in any illegal activities! After explaining it was for media coursework he was happy to let me take more pictures, although I had to stay at a distance. Once I had got all my pictures I remembered that I had another story to fill the bottom left of the page and noticed there was Santa just across the road, so I quickly ran over, had a quick chat and took his photo. That was my inside page done! The pictures of the two boys was captured in college a while before I started my inside page so I simply used them to add more substance to the story. As you can see I have more pictures than necessary, as I continued taking pictures in various locations across Maghull just in case I needed them in future, also I will probably not be using all of those pictures on my inside page. Only a few are necessary to make my story stand out and the rest will be filled with text.

Starting my poster

 For my poster I decided to use a loudspeaker to match with the name of the print 'Liverpool Voice'. Initially I wanted to use a bugle but after talking it through with my teacher and friends I decided it didn't make much sense. I managed to borrow a loudspeaker and take a few pictures until I found the one I wanted to use. I used a teacher in my picture as I have used teenagers in all of my other photoshoots, and since I want my newspaper to appeal to a wider audience it didn't seem logical to use another student. When the shoot was done I struggled to think of anything creative to do with it (since it is just my teacher standing near a wall with a loudspeaker) so I chose to cut out the background and turn him into a silhouette (which i guess defeats the point of using an older model!). I'm currently working on coming up with more ideas for my poster but I will definitey be using the bottom silhoutte picture in my final product. 

Inside page ideas

Today I looked inside a local newspaper to get some more ideas for my inside page layout. I was surprised to see that there was quite a wide variety of layouts on each page within the same newspaper, so it wasn't such a linear decision as I first thought. Some of the pages had a massive amount of text and little amount of pictures whilst some others had a lot of adverts and pictures with a minimal amount of text. After looking through all the pages I decided to follow a similar layout to the bottom picture, with the story in the top left corner of the page, related pictures surrounding it and a big space for adverts at the bottom. Unlike this layout I won't use the bottom half of the page primarily for adverts, but I may add another short story in the bottom right corner just because I think it will look more professional. A lot of people choose to follow the same layout as the second page or something similar so I'm happy to do something a little different that is to my own taste, yet still stick to a conventional newspaper layout.