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 !

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.

Day One in our teams and start of the project

In college today (02/03/10) we had the first lesson on the Xtended project, and my first lesson incharge of Gold team. It was fairly hectic becuase nobody really knows what their doing at the moment so there was just alot of confusion and people trying to get organised. Alex was getting in contact with our client, Jenny Graham (editor of Media Magazine). Kirk, Mike and Tara were trying to get things started in a working meeting, dishing out instructions to the 3 production teams and the three production leaders (Me, Phillipa and Loz) were trying to give instructions whilst doing our own work as well. I set Matt and Tim to write out a list of possible things to go into the paper, articles, activitys etc. Loz, Phillipa and i had a small meeting to disguss what each team was doing, Red team were looking into designing the layout and look of the paper and Blue team were researching.

Towards the end of the lesson Dave (Media teacher) who has experience working for publishers, spoke to us about the template of how a publishers works, he explained how each role is performed, how to lay out the production and make sure everyone was working from the same copy of work.

this talk really helped me understand what it was we needed to do.

at the end of the lesson i set Matt and Tim some work to do for tommorow, i asked Tim to write an article about a game weve been playing using wikipidiea and asked Matt to create a crossword reating to media in the online age.

Initial thoughts

My initial thoughts on the project are of fairly mixed feelings, I'm not very confident with writing tasks and the nature of a newspaper kind of worried me, but at the same time i'm looking forward to the challenge. Being appointed a team leader also scared me quite a bit, and still does.  When dealing with something i'm confident in i consider my self a strong, capable leader. But when it comes to something like this, that i'm not strong at, all my leadership skills brake down. I hope i'm able to pull through, i like a challenge so it's going to be interesting.

Project Q&A

After Nick had explained the project he asked us to all write down any questions we had, we then took it in turns to ask our questions, these are the most relevant ones asked:

• When does it go to print? - Everything has to be finished and ready to be sent off by April 1st.
  
• How new does what we talk about have to be? - Everything has to be up to date. It has to be for people our age, so there's no point talking about Napster and stuff. Try and focus on things teachers are less likely to know about. Under the radar stuff.
  
• What is the budget? - Nothing. We must raise production costs ourselves.
  
• What are the production costs? - 500 copies of full colour 12 page news is £500.
  
• Can we credit ourselves at the end? - Yeah, go nuts.
  
• Do we know anyone that might put ad's in? - Yeah, Media Magazine, The Junction, OCR.
  
• Do we choose who does what? - Yeah, you vote for who does what.
  
• Are we supplied with the information? - No, you need to source your content yourselves.
  
• What methods of distribution do we have? - Sold with Media Magazine, on the website
  
• Is there a limit to content? - No copyrighted material, no inaproppriate language. Aimed at our age.
  

Xtended Project schedule

1-5 march - defining the task, setting up blogs, allocating jobs, early research, project proposal forms.

8-12 march - research and planning, feedback from client, ongoing blogging of ALL activity.

15-19 march - draft materials and further feedback, ongoing activity blogging.

22-26 march - trial materials with year 12 and make refinements for finished product/ newspaper

19-1st april - completion of newspaper for client and printing, completion of activity log and evaluation activity.

Assignment of Job roles

In todays lesson Nick handed out a sheet with all of the role on, blank and we had go away and fill in who we thought would be best in each position.

(here is a picture of the sheet nick handed out)

Once we had all filled in a sheet we handed them back to nick and he collated the information and assigned to roles.

• Liaison = Alex
• Evidence = Tara
• Reflection = Mike
• Schedule =  Kirk

Red Team

• Loz (Leader)
• Hayden
• Matt H
• Dave

Blue Team

• Phillipa (Leader)
• James
• Alie
• Joe

Gold Team

• Me (Leader)
• Tim
• Matt L
• Ash

Nick colated the information from our sheets to get the leaders and QC team and then the 3 leaders (Me, Loz and Phillipa) sat together and worked out what the most productive teams would be. We wrote down who was available:

• Tim
• Matt L
• Matt H
• Hayden
• Alie
• Ash
• James
• Joe
• Dave

We then decided out of those who were the least reliable with attendance, because we didn't want to put all the unreliable people in one group as there would often be nobody from that group in lesson and we would end up with big chunks missing from the paper.

The people that turn up the least are: 

• Joe
• Ash
• Dave
• Hayden

with this in mind we put one of each in a team and Hayden and Dave together because they are slightly more reliable and we had to put two in one group. the rest of the teams we just tried to spread abilities and working styles out.

Introduction to the Xtended project

The Xtended project is our next project were doing for the diploma. For the project we are producing one issue of a news paper style revision guide for students taking the media A2 exam on Media in the online age.

We will be producing the news paper in a class, the class will be divided into 4 groups of 4. The 4 groups are Blue team, Red team, Gold team and Quality control group. The Quality control group is made up of: 

1. The 'Liaison' who is the person that will speak to the client.
   
2. The Schedule manager who will keep everyone on track and remind them what they need to do.
   
3. The Reflection manager whos job will be to keep an eye on everyones blogs and advise them of how to improve them.
   
4. The Evidence manager who will gather eveidence and make sure everyone has relevant evidence on their blogs.
   

Each of the three colour teams (Blue, Gold and Red) have 3 workers and a leader, the leaders job will be to talk to the quality control group and take the points and needs of the paper to the 3 workers to get things produced.