Evaluation

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge codes conventions of real

media texts?• Before I came up with my idea of masthead, I searched for various local and international newspapers.

Daily post, The News, Dawn, The Boston Blog, Local News were some of the newspapers which helped me with the real conventions of masthead of it to be bold with large font so its easily visible. Below are some newspapers masthead from which I took help :

• My product develops the conventions of these mastheads, drawing inspiration from the color schemes and font types whilst adding a piece of my own creativity as well. The reason I stayed to typical newspaper conventions is because newspapers tend to use very similar font types, and usually choose primary colors such as black or red to draw the attention of the audience. To go against these conventions would make my product look unprofessional and subsequently my target audience may not be effectively reached, resulting in a loss of profit. So my masthead it rather simple, consisting of New Times Roman bold font in black. But I had to give a recognization of the city as it’s the local magazine, as Lahore is well known for its Badshahi Mosque so I added a grayscale picture in the background.

• For the rest of the front page I have followed the real media conventions, whether it’s the index or the cover story. It also consists of two advertisements, one local and one of the famous fizzy drink brand; Coca-cola. In my print I decided to add short articles in the bottom corner of both my front page and inside page as well. This is a common feature in newspapers and was crucial in the flow of the newspaper, without which there would be too many adverts in the lower portion of the page. These conformed to the typical conventions of an article as it is not designed to draw too much attention away from the rest of the page, therefore it would be counter-intuitive to deviate from these conventions. I used the typical bold heading and also used the line 'Continues page 4' to let the reader know that there is a more in depth article on the story later on in the newspaper.

• Here are the conventions of a local newspaper and my front page. This is arguably the most important part of the newspaper as it is what the audience is actually buying the media for, so it has to look professional and follow specific conventions otherwise it may not attract readers. Typically newspapers use either 3 or 5 columns of text in their stories. For my inside page I chose to use 6 columns. I followed the typical conventions of a newspaper for my inside page and front page story and I believe the outcome looks professional and will effectively attract my chosen target audience.

Masthead

Advertisement

Cover story

Image

Advertisement

Insider

Side Stories

Front Page

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

• When combining my main product with the ancillary text, I realized that to make it effective I need to keep consistency between both the main page and the poster. For that, I had to follow same colors, logo and overall image of the product.

• Firstly I realized to make the go hands in hands, I need to keep the same font for the masthead and the poster font itself.

Same Logos and Font

• After critical evaluation of my main product and ancillary's I realized although my products do combine effectively. My poster uses a consistent color scheme with my main product with the black fonts. Furthermore the blurred image in the background seeks the attention at the phrases written in bold. This will help attract more target audience onto buying and reading the local newspaper.

• The second ancillary task; Radio Ad had a great combination to that of the main product; Newspaper. The radio ad does advertise the newspaper to a greater level, as it gives a briefing of the newspaper name, type and the date of it being issued to the store. The radio ad makes a effective combination as its spreads the main idea of without becoming boring for the listeners.

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

• In the media, and everyday life in general, getting to know what the audience think is essential! So this is why people choose to ask the audience for their feedback, as it is them who will be using and paying for the end product. This is why I carried a research questionnaire before working on my final product. The questionnaire from my target audience in the research and development stage was very helpful. I asked some basic questions regarding the newspaper. The basic questions helped me decide on what kind of newspaper I need to work on. There are some of the questions which were of great help when I started designing my newspaper;

• This question helped me know what percent of my target audience actually reads the news paper daily.

• I asked this question to check if the headline really mattered, the audience reviews gave me the idea that I need to work on my headlines of the main article and the sub articles as it is the main focus area for the audience. So this way I kept the font large and bold to stand out the newspaper.

• This question was very important as it made me realize that I have to give equal attention to my headlines and images, because looking at the audience reviews it was pretty obvious that these were the main areas of focus.

• This question also turned out to be very helpful as it gave me the main idea on which sections I had to pay more attention to as they were the audiences favorite sections of reading. So metro section had to be made more crispy where as daily news and sports were to be given equal share of attention.

• The targeted audience was pretty interested in add-ins in the newspaper so I had to had research on this section specifically so I can please my audience well.

• It was a relief to have the audience give their preference on this part on whether to or not to have the full story on the front page. And hence, after getting the audience opinion, I made my front page accordingly.

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

stages?• Hardware Used:

To capture Images.

For the placement of the camera

For the working on the newspaper

Radio Station, for the making of the ad

• Software Used:

Photoshop for the production of the newspaper.

Photoscape for editing newspaper pictures.

Blogger.com

Slideshare for uploading material. Eg Questionnaire results.

Yourlisten.com for uploading the radio ad.

Dafont for various fonts, when deciding for the final font,

Microsoft Word for article writing and corrections.

Itunes for buying the song for Radio Ad.

Microsoft PowerPoint for slide making.

Window Image Viewer

Audacity for Merging Voice and Music for Radio Ad.

BSI for Radio Ad.