Newspaper - Audience Research

Hello and welcome to my BlogSpot. In the following posts I shall be providing you with the research stage of my A2 media coursework of creating a new local newspaper. In order to create this I will need to do some research into other local newspapers to find out what is featured, what is standard to a local newspaper and how I can manipulate my newspaper to make it unique and suited to my own local area.

Please feel free to quickly jump to a page using the blog archive to the right and click on the name of the designated page you wish to visit.

The first thing I shall be doing is looking at other local newspapers and what they feature. I shall be looking at the first 3 pages of the newspaper as this is what is required for me to make in the project briefing. Okay, so onto the good stuff. The first local newspaper that I shall be looking at is the Reading Evening Post.

Reading Evening Post:
• Use of a traditional Newspaper Header
• Weekly edition rather than everyday
• Picture and Headline
• Main story on front page with part of the story, much like a global newspaper e.g. the times
• Advertisement of Local football team news


Henley Standard:
• Use of a traditional Newspaper Header
• Picture headline set up standard
• Gothic styled header, suggests age of town or suggests a mature audience
• Black and White texts rather than colour


Reading Chronicle:
• Modernised header
• Much larger size, generally landscaped rather than portrait
• Same use of a large image and story, but with more of the story on the front page
• Advertises other sections in the paper e.g. Jobs, Classifieds
• Advertisement of local football team and sport news

Okay, now that we have looked at three slightly different local newspapers we have established some similarities between them such as the use of a picture and part of a story on the front cover. Also we have noticed the use of advertisement to attract readers such as classifieds, sports news, and jobs. A key difference between the three has been the paper logo, with the two Reading papers taking a modernised approach with the use of colour, compared to the Henley newspaper which used a gothic styled font and is kept black and white. This works nicely in the case of this newspaper as it has a tagline of “Delivering the news from Henley-on-Thames and South Oxfordshire for over 100 years”.

Moving swiftly on, I shall now be creating and sending out some questionnaires to be filled out by 10 people from the age range of 15+ in order to gather results on what should be in a local newspaper and what can be improved to make the newspaper a hit within a local society.

Newspaper - Questionnaire

Hello and thank you for showing interest and participating in helping to create the ideal local newspaper for your local community. Please answer the following questions with a tick.

(1) How often do you prefer your local newspaper?

Daily?

Weekly?

Monthly?

(2) What attracts you to reading your local newspaper?

Sports?

Jobs?

News?

(3) In your newspaper which of the following would you prefer to be added? (choose one)

Music column?

Political Column?

Free ads?

Sports Column?

(4) What is your age range?

10-15?

16-18?

19-21?

22+?

(5) Which of the following newspaper names do you prefer? (choose one)

The Reading Herald?

The Reading Telegraph?

The Oracle?

Reading Times?

Reading Standard?

Reading Guardian?

Please return via post. Thank you for participating.

Newspaper - Graphs

Having being provided with results from my questionnaire I have been able to turn that information into graphs. The use of the graphs has helped me come to the conclusion of how my newspaper shall look and the features it shall bare. The graphs can be seen below;











To conclude, by sending out these questionnaires in order to find out about newspapers i have gathered information from a vast set of age groups, from age 10 years to 22years +, it has allowed me to find features in which they want to find in common with my local newspaper, the request for news, music and sports columns. The public also helped to be sure on the name of my newspaper, most voting for The Reading News. I decided to take this information rather than scrap it because the newspaper is set to cater for people of all ages and the name provides a simple edge and competition against other manufactured newspapers, even with its simplicity.

Newspaper - Hand drawn designs

For my newspaper I had to create hand drawn designs. This would be the foundations of what I would want my newspaper to looks like as it would give me a chance to note down colours or things such as background and fonts, font type and size and positioning of text and images when used. Below you can see the four different hand drawn designs I made, with two of them representing different design ideas of the front cover and the other two for the music and sports page;

Newspaper Front Cover (1)

Newspaper Front Cover (2)

Newspaper - Sports Page

Newspaper - Music Page

The Newspaper Draft

Please click on the images below to view my newspaper and the accompanying two pages.

Newspaper - Front Cover

Newspaper - Music Page

Newspaper - Focus Group

I decided to use a focus group in order to gain feedback on my what I had created. By doing this it would help me to makeany improvements which would make it more professional and look like a newspaper. Below are some of the comments that I receieved;

"Personally it doesn't look like a newspaper, but more of a fanzine. I would make the newspaper title bigger on the main page and i would fill the space correctly with the story. I would also change the entire layout of the music page. The newspaper doesn't look right and needs a few changes." Nick Rickford

"I would change the size of the newspapers title to make it stand out more." Nick Beard

"I like the images but i would again change the layout of things in order to make it look like a newspaper" Jonathon Mahon-Daly

Okay, so the feedback wasn't directly positive however, it has led me to make a few changes in order to make it look like a magazine. The newspaper I had to start with was in A4 size, i decided to change this into A3 in order to make it realistically newspaper size. I then decided to completely change the layout and add more stories to the music page. By doing this it has allowed me make it more like a newspaper but for the local community. Please see this in the post listed as "The Final Newspaper".

Newspaper

Please see below the newly improved and final versions of my newspaper.

Front Cover

Music Page