Week two plan & reflection

Friday 12th

In the first lesson of today, Barney helped us understand how to link our articles to the exam more and help us be able to write them to make them more accesible for the reader.

this is a photo of the work on the board in class.



as you can see in the picture there are 5 titles, each title with 6 catagorys underneath, we ordered the 6 catagorys in order of relevance. We then had a class discussion about weather we all agreed with how each person had ordered the catagorys to their article ideas.

Advertising

I could see Alex was clearly being loaded with a lot of work, and everyone seemed to only really be paying attention to their own work. i knew Alex was yet to find time to look for companies to contact, requesting money towards the costs of our project (£500 to pay for printing the newspapers). I offered my assistance to Alex for this because i am good at contacting companies and i am very persuasive. i also found this part of the project the most interesting because it's fun but also important to search think of possibilities, contact them, negotiate with them and be able to get somthing important out of it at the end.

We need £500 to cover the entire cost of printing, we originally considerd having 2 adverts per page and charging £20 for each advert, but quickly disregarded this idea as it would have gotten very complicated. So we decided to narrow it down to between 2 and 5 adverts, one of which would be a front page banner and would be charged at around £200 - £300 and the others would be on the back and center pages at about £100 each. this would get us more than we need, but we figured too much is better than too little and these prices were not un-reasonable.

We started off finding companies/organisations by thinking of as many as we could that would potentially be interested, the list looked like this:

1) Media Magazine
2) The Junction
3) Picture House
4) OCR
5) Skill Set
6) Star Radio
7) Heart FM
8) Long Road
9) Haydens Dads Graphic design business

Alex and I then picked out the weakest ones, comanies that were not related to media or education. the ones we got rid of straight away were:

1. Skill Set (because we already had a large grant from them for our last project)
2. Star radio
3. Heart FM
4. Haydens Dad

This left us with:

1. Media Magazine
2. The Junction
3. Picture House
4. OCR
5. Long Road

It then also occoured to us that prospective universitys like Bournemouth and Lincoln may have an interest in funding us becuase the paper will be going to students in the middle of making their university choices and if they find the paper usefull and see Bournmouth or Lincolns Logos the students may become interested in looking at these unis with the potential of applying.

With this in mind we added them to our list, the list now looks like this

1. Media Magazine
2. The Junction
3. Picture House
4. OCR
5. Long Road
6. Bournemouth University
7. Lincoln University

We decided to stick with this list, it consisted of more organisations than we were looking for, but as i said before, to many is better than too few !

Thursday 11th

Today we didn't do much work on the Xtended project because we recived our results and spent 3/4s of the day discusing them with nick. When we got working, most of the class continued writing their articles for the paper, however i am still currently waiting for a reply from Simon Panrucker and David Gauntlett, the two practitioners i am writing charecter profiles on. because i was unable to write my article i spent the rest of the lesson brain storming possible new articles and genrally helped my team with theirs.

Wednesday 10th (not in college)

I was unable to attend college today because i was ill, although it seems i didn't miss anything improtant because our regular room was unavailable so the class didn't have acces to our laptops or the internet.

Day Five, 9/3/10

Dave came in again today, to give a more indepth talk about the processes of producing and publishing a news paper or magazine.

the first thing he said to us, is a key rule when it comes to the content, and a question that should be asked for every single article. that question is " Do we need this in our product". More specifically this meens, is the article interesting, does it serve a perpose, will it reach our intended audience. if any of these come out as a no or a maybe then that meens the article needs to be improved or even removed totally.

To make sure your article sucessfully checks 'yes' to all of the above questions, the writer needs to have a fairly indepth knowledge of the subject, or at the very least, come across as if they do.

Dave broke down the key to writing an interesting article;

Research

Wikipedia is always a good start and provides basic knowledge on pretty much anything you may need to know.

Use the title's of people you know, for example 'Pete Fraser, Chief Examiner'. It makes the article and what goes into it much more impressive and professional to a reader.

Find experts in the area you are reporting. This is important for fresh and up-to-date information.

Angle

Look at other articles of a similar topic.

Come up with a fresh angle for the article that you're writing.

Tone (Think of the variety of articles you can have in your piece)

News

Opinion pieces

Features

Interviews

Advertorial (These look like articles, but are funded by third-party clients and promote the product in question. They are adverts.)

Day Four, 8/3/10

My whole group were here today. In the first lesson of the day, we started with another steering group meeting, to discuss the new ideas we had come up with. The three group leaders (Myself, Loz and Philippa) spoke to our groups and wrote down the ideas each of them had come up with for possible articles and took the ideas back to the meeting. once we were all back we disscussed each idea in resonable detail, and then decided which were the best for the newspaper.

After the meeting, Alex and I continued researching possible companies to advertise in our paper to in return get money to pay for the project. Today we refined our list to more appropriate businesses, ones with either media or educational links.