Target Audience

The target audience for local papers in general are local residents, so obviously, there is a great range for these papers. Local papers are delivered or made available to residents in a certain area. Obviously, residents would include a large number of different types of people - different ages, jobs, etcetera. The content of local newspapers tend to be largely based around young people - school achievements in the area, council issues, local stories about people in the area. This type of news would likely appeal to a middle-aged person because they would send their children to school and therefore care about the local issues about schools and councils. However, the news content itself and the style of journalism is low-brow in terms of language and the stories selected, so it would not appeal to somebody with a semi-professional or professional job. I think the audience for local newspapers would be working class middle-aged adults.

Myself and Joe studied the News Shopper, Sevenoaks Chronicle, The Bromley Times and the Metro. The News Shopper covers Bromley, Bexley, Dartford, Gravesend, Greenwich, and Lewisham and is either delivered to residents' houses or made available in local newsagents.

This type of paper is designed to appeal to middle-aged, working class people. We can see this because the content of the newspaper is largely based around council issues and, again, schooling. This tends to be the kind of news that would appeal to parents and people that don't necessarily commute because commuters tend to work in the city, which means they tend to have more professional jobs and will also have access to other free papers like the Metro.

The Metro is interesting because is differs from the other papers we looked at. It is available for free at stations and on the Tube, and therefore is designed to appeal to commuters. The language and content is instantly more high-brow than the type of content in the News Shopper. The Metro tends to have arts-type stories quite frequently and therefore is a little more sophisticated than the stories in the News Shopper. So, we can conclude that the Metro is designed to appeal to commuters. They will be around 25-45 years old and will have semi-professional to professional jobs.

The demographics of the areas can be considered, too - the Metro is circulating in London, a very wealthy area because of the huge amount of highly-paid jobs, tourist revenue, and the obvious point being that it is a city, and cities tend to be centres for wealth. In London, there are hundreds of galleries, attractions, entertainments, and the Metro caters to these.

We are designing our paper to appeal to young people, as there seems to be a gap in the market for this. For some time, the London Lite catered for this group - the content was mostly about celebrities, and was written in relaxed, casual language. However the London Lite is not around anymore, and we thought it would be interesting to create a newspaper for young people.

We wanted to make the newspaper about local issues - something like the News Shopper but for younger people. This would cover local issues and what is going on in schools, young people's acheivements, competitions, so that they can keep up with events.

The audience for this kind of paper would be mostly teenagers, from 14 to around 17, and they would be students. Obviously, they would be unemployed as they are at school, or may have a part-time job.

Using the VALS system, these young people would be Experiencers; young kids that spend their income on experiences with new products, new music, but get bored easily. They are rebellious and like to keep up with their friends.

They might also be considered Trendies or Groupies - the kids want to keep up with their friends and be accepted.