My media product was a newspaper which I created with another student. The very first thing we studied when starting to plan our newspaper were the conventions of existing media products.
Since our newspaper was designed to be a free, local newspaper, we started to look at local newspapers in our areas. We studied the News Shopper, the Metro, Sevenoaks Chronicle and the Bromley Times.
When designing our new
spaper we decided it would be useful to follow the conventions set out by these like products because it would be instantly recognisable as a newspaper, and would be accessible to many people. We placed the headline and masthead in the top left, as you would see on a real newspaper, and our text was formatted in columns.
We felt that, when set ancillary tasks, we would not be able to access these forms because of the lack of advertising for newspapers. However, almost as soon as we encountered this issue, we began to n
otice that newspapers like the Sun had started displaying advertisments in bus shelters, and the Guardian and Observer were advertising on the sides of buses. We thought this was interesting as we had never seen this done before. However, we have not seen advertisments for local newspapers, but felt that this would probably be down to the fact that these newspapers are generally free and so probably do not have the income to advertise. We also considered that there may not have been a need for advertising - both myself and Jo
e receive our local newspaper, the News Shopper, through the mail, despite the fact that this service was not signed up for. So, even if a lesser proportion of recipients read the newspaper, the delivery of the newspaper was in itself a form of advertising.
We decided to challenge this convention and designed a poster. Since this newspaper was meant to attract a younger audience, we wanted to make it bright, but it is not a magazine - it is a paper designed to attract young people that are interested in local issues. The placement of the gold iPod on the poster is meant to make young people read the paper to enter a competition - it is meant to be an incentive.
I created the gold iPod using Photoshop and we believed that creating an easy-to-see poster that would stand out would be a good combination with our newspaper.
Our second ancillary text was a website. All of the local newspapers we studied had websites, so we felt it would be important to make one. We tried to follow the conventions of these texts as best we could.
I feel that the combination of the main product and ancillary texts is an effective one, as it appeals to our target audience. These young people travel around on buses and in cars all the time; to travel to school, college, to visit friends, go to parties, etc., so they are exposed to advertising constantly- on billboards, bus stations, buses, shop fronts, bulletin boards outside and inside churches, schools, youth groups, shopping centres, libraries, cinemas and parks. They see more advertising than they remember each day- and being part of this target audience ourselves helped us see this. We felt that making a poster in response to this would be a good choice for our task. As for the website, young people are very technologically savvy, and are becoming more so with each technological innovation. Access to th
e internet is widespread and free in places like schools and libraries. Mobile phones are available with contracts that allow free internet access anywhere, anytime. The iPhone and other "smart" phones now allow the installation of apps (applications) which tie into websites, bank accounts, services, RSS feeds from blogs and forums. These innovations have all come about in myself and Joe's lifetime, and as such, we have a better understanding than anyone of the power of these services. Young people are able to access anything, anytime, so a website is perfect for a generation that is so tuned-in to the internet. These ancillary tasks tied in with our newspaper and shared colour schemes so that they can be identified together, and have allowed us, theoretically, to reach our target audience.
The main things we learned while collecting audience feedback from our peer groups were that people preferred a conventional, simple website with little loading time to something that was more entertaining to look at. We were told that young people did not usually have the patience to wait for websites to load - checking the news was not a priority for young people. So, when they had a minute, they would log on to check the headlines, but would give up if the page did not load quickly. Therefore myself and Joe decided to keep our website as minimalist as possible, giving it a clean, simple feel in favor of something elaborate.
We also learned from our audience that they prefer websites that are easy to navigate, rather than having to look through the whole website to find what they are looking for. We decided then to add a clear navigation bar so that everything could be found easily and added a search bar. This aids navigation and speeds up the process of finding the type of news that is required. We also learned that our target audience like to check the news using iPhone apps or Blackberrys, and a clear navigation bar separating all the information into sections is easier to read on a small screen.
We had to learn a great deal about new media technologies in order to complete our projects. More important than the knowledge of individual hardware and software was the knowledge of collaborating these products to create one image or product.
For instance, the picture to the left shows a gold iPod. In order to create this, we had to set up a white background and take a good quality picture using a DSLR. This then had to be uploaded to Photoshop, where we edited out the white background and changed the colour to make the iPod look special. The iPod was originally dark blue, so finding out how to make the gold look convincing was a challenge. Then, the photoshop file had to be exported to InDesign - a piece of software I have very little knowledge of - to be placed into our newspaper. The same thing had to be done with iWeb for our website. Of course, I have also learned how to use Blogger to document my work, iCal to plan it, and Slideshare to present certain elements of my work.
This whole project has been a complex collaboration of different software, and more importantly, finding out which software does specific things well. We would decide to create an image in Photoshop, place it on the layout of our newspaper in InDesign - it was important to use each piece of software to do the things we thought that software would do best, and then collaborate it.
This media project has taught me how to master using a new media innovation in a short space of time so that I could get the best of that software and move on to something else so that the product could be finished.
