Feedback

We have received some feedback about our magazine already, Jenny Graham said "MedieMe looks great. Works really well with the colour, etc. Mega achievement."

More interestingly, in my opinion, however, was the feedback we received from Mary Berrisford at Islington who said "We've just put the underground map on the wall and are fighting about who is on the coolest line (that's the teachers not the students by the way!) Initial reaction is that we can't wait to use it in the classroom- could be a few more bigger images in there.. We'll use it with students next week (weds) and email you some more feedback"

This is great, because she specifically mentioned the piece i worked on, and even though she said the teachers cared about it more than the students, it has caused the response i was hoping for and clearly was worth doing.

Cash Monies!

To make this project work, and get 500 full colour 12 page newspapers it was going to cost us £500 and, obviously, we don't have that kind of money kicking around so we had to get it another way. We decided the best way to raise the money we needed was to sell advertising space in the magazine. We asked several Universities if they wanted to put an advert in the paper, as it would be a good place to advertise given that it would be distributed to students. We also asked the Junction because we know them and have worked with them before, and Simon had some left-over cash, and could use the advertising.

Our total outgoings were £511.40:

500 newspapers - £500
P&P - £11.40

Our total income came to about £655 due to adverts and sales.

The Junction gave us £350 for advertising space
Lincoln University gave us £100 for advertising space
OCR gave us £100 for advertising space

This alone came to £550 so we were already £50 in profit. Score!

Gurnsey Grammar School bought 20 copies for £10
Reigate School bought 120 copies for £60
Islington bought 40 copies for £20
Netherhall bought 30 copies for £15

This is about £1o5 so we are now £155 ahead!

We kept about 50 so we could have one each, moderaters and stuff needed them etc.

We still have 260 copies to sell, and Jenny is advertising it on OCR teachers week this week so we should be able to make some more cash!

EEEEEEvaluation

How well does it meet your original intentions?

The finished paper basically meets my original expectations. I wasn’t hoping for much, granted, but i knew we had to produce a full blown newspaper that would help with exam revision and be interesting to students. We should really have concentrated more on the relevant articles, such as the exam answers and the questions, instead of going straight into less relevant things such as Wiki World Tour or Zeitgeist Forecasts.

Some of the articles were relevant and may actually help people when it comes to revision, however some are less or totally irrelevant to the exam. Several articles were written from a very set point of view, and probably wouldn’t help that much, so had to be either changed, removed or only used online.

We only worked on the exam questions near the deadline as a last minute thing, which was a mistake. We should have assigned someone to do those right at the start as they were most important instead of waiting for a teacher to say “where the hell is this..”. People didn’t see it as is fun as whatever they were working on so didn’t bother to write about it and therefore it simply didn’t get done, however we got something in the end and i am quite pleased with how it turned out.

How does it look?

At a first glance, the inside looks like an actual newspaper. Words and pictures thrown in seemingly at random, the use of crossheads and stuff worked well for us in this aspect. If you look at it for longer, however, you can tell it was made by students, just by the sue of colour and how certain things are said. They aren’t exactly informal, but they aren’t as wordy and intense as some newspapers choose to phrase things.

Given that we paid for colour, i think we could have used a bit more as most of it was simply for emphasizing titles and important bits. I used more colour than anyone else as i did the Tube Map, which was basically 2 pages of colour, and i had a massive picture in the middle of my article. I think it looks pretty good, still not entirely sure about the front page though.

How pleased are you with your contributions?

I am quite pleased with my contributions to the paper, because while potentially no vital to the paper, i think they work quite well. The Tube Map, especially, as it adds a break in the paper and is quite different to what anyone else has done. My original article, the Wiki World Tour one, started by us playing it. Someone then decided i should use it as my article, so i started trying to explain its benefits as a research tool. This was harder than it sounds, because however you explain it, it doesn’t really sound helpful, but i believe could be.

I think it is much improved with the use of the graphic, i decided to use post-it notes, and a font that almost looks hand written. Some of them are crossed out because they didn’t work, or didn’t help you get to the bit you want to get to, which i liked. This article isn’t vital to the newspaper, but i think it adds a bit of fun if someone tries to play the game.

After completing that, i needed something else to do, and vaguely remembered someone mentioning a web 2.0 version of the London Tube Map, similar to the one we tried to make with TV drama. This was much harder to start, as i was doing it alone, i needed to work out how many stations were on each line, and what each line should be. Once i had figured out which line was which, it was boring, but i started the process of finding the websites i could use.

After i while i got into putting the names in and got on with the map quite quickly. It was surprisingly easier to work alone and complete it than when we tried to do it in a group, and i think it looks quite good. I’m basically sure the stations all fit in, and everyone else seems to like it. I think it works well as a centrepiece as it, as far as i am aware, is our only double page spread.

How effectively do you think you worked in your role and others in theirs?

I think i did well in my role. I worked on my article and managed to complete it easily within the time i was given. I also took it upon myself to start a new project for the newspaper without being told to. I got bored waiting for people to give me something to do so i started working on the logistics of making the Tube Map work. Ultimately, if i had been able to access that as much as i could my article, i would have been able to do it quicker, and wouldn’t have been so rushed towards the end of the deadline to get it finished.

I think the rest of our team worked quite well, too because we all managed to hand in a complete article well within the given deadline, and listened to any advice or feedback we were given. Our team leader worked quite well, but sometimes seemed like he couldn’t be bothered and got a bit annoyed with us hassling him to give us work.

What could be learnt from this experience?

I think the main thing we learnt in this project is how well we can work as a team if we have to. I know a lot of our class like being able to take control of everything and do it all their own way, which, while may be beneficial for them, doesn’t really help anyone else if they have to evaluate a project that they haven’t one anything on. Taking people away from their ideal roles and putting other people in charge worked well as it gave them a chance to organize themselves however they wanted, and i think we worked very well.

I think using an actual company was a really good idea, as we totally had to meet our deadlines. Occasionally, on our projects one or two people don’t quite make it and hang around after college a bit to finish uploading their videos or whatever they still have to do. This time, however, we had to have everything e-mailed to the appropriate people by a certain time or we wouldn’t be able to finish the project. This gave everyone the kicking they needed to get the work done on time, which was a big improvement.

What has been learnt from previous experience?

Given how badly some of our attempts to work together as a class worked out, we have clearly learnt a lot and improved our teamworking skills. For the show project, we started as a while class, and simply couldn’t get anywhere. We were constantly arguing and ended up splitting the group in half. This time, however, putting different people in charge and giving people set job roles meant they couldn’t argue about who was doing what and we could work efficiently as a team.

We also knew from previous experience who we should and shouldn’t put in charge of things. We figured we could trust Alex to talk to the client and go do things, so we set him as the liaison. We knew Tara, Matt and Kirk can work well and efficiently, so we put them as quality control. We chose the team leaders because thy were people we thought could take control, but not be too controlling and everyone else just got on with essays.

Overall

I think we did pretty well in the end, as we have produced a half-decent looking paper, that at brief glance can look almost official, but when you actually look at it, works for students and may well help them with their exam preparation. We managed to work well as a whole class team, which hasn’t worked out before, and we all managed to contribute something useful to the finished product.

Risk Assessment

For this project, there aren't that many risks as obviously it is basically all done on the computer. I guess we could stare at screens for too long, which could be dangerous, or we could trip over cables laying around but that's about it.

Tube Map

After submitting the Tube Map, JG said it was brilliant, but was pretty useless without some text explaining what it is, what it represents and how it was put together. So i started writing a bit about what the lines are and why i made the thign in the first place.

I also wrote a bit about the guy that made it originally and how we came about trying to make one.

Friday

Today i put my article into the template we had been given. In the feedback i received from Jenny said i should find a more interesting way to list the links from Dark River to Steve Jobs. So after thinking about it for a while, i found a creative commons image of a post-it note and copied it about 15 times onto Photoshop. I then used a font that looked similar to handwriting and locked the image and text layers together. After i had locked the layers, i was free to move and rotate them so it looked more interesting than a simple line.

FINISHED

Today i completed the Tube Map. I want to get it either printed, or at least looked at by some other people to check through it and suggest any errors or problems they find in it. That way i can ensure that it is all correct and i didn't miss anything or get it all horribly wrong.

Wed 24th

Today, i finally got rouns to working on the Tube Map again. One thing i hadn't taken into consideration whilst coming up with the list for stations, was the the 'London Overground' is featured on the map, too - so i had about 150 extra stations that had to join in. After discussing it with my team, we decided just removing the lines from the map was the best way to go, or i would have to start again to make it all link, as i didn't know what the lines should be or how they could link up.

When i eventually got round to re-naming all the stations, it became much easier. The more you add in, the less you have to do. I managed to complete one line by adding 2 station names in because they had already been named while doing other lines. I currently only have one track left to do, which i should be able to do tomorrow. I then plan to print it out and get people to look at it to make sure i haven't used the same station twice, and make sure i have got the links correct, otherwise there is no point in doing it.

Ghost Dave 23/3/2010

Here are things Dave said we should do:

Develop own style - different for each article, but consistent throughout paper. News should all look similar, features have to look different but have similar traits.

Title - Attention Grabbing. Decide Fonts. Easily Readable.

Strapline (Sub-Title) - Slightly more context - New Font?

Number of columns

First Paragraph - Intro. Sucks reader into reading article. How is it different? Bold? Italic? Font?

Massive first letter to show start of feature?

Cross Heads - Key words or phrases to explain next paragraph

Pull Out Quote - Quote to grab attention and drag reader in

Presentational Box - Pictures - Square Corners? Round Corners?

Caption Fonts - Explain what image is

Arrow from caption to image?

Box Out - Information from external source explaining something

Page Number/Information/Title/Issue Number/Date/Logo

By Line - Beginning? End? Picture?

Plan for this week

Basically, all i intend to do this week is complete that Tube Map, as i need to have it finished and looked at so i can ensure it is all kosher.

Monday 15th - Thursday 18th

As we have been unable to access our media room, and i have no way of working on the Tube Map work at home, i have made no progress on that, which is what i was planning on doing this week. This puts me at an obvious disadvantage, because i have missed several lessons where i should have been working on that because we have been unable to get to it. Instead, i have recieved several pieces of feedback on my article. Two people took copies home, read through it, annotated it and gave me suggestions as to how i could improve and link it to the exam paper better so that is what i have been doing. This is hard though, because my article is about the Wikipedia Game as a research tool, and not about Wikipedia in general. It is very easy to get distracted and just explain Wikipedia, which i am trying to avoid as James is doing an article on that, i think.

Flat Plan

This shows our basic flat plan. What will go where etc.

Friday 12th

Today i continued working on the Underground Map. It is a lot easier to make it using web 2.0 than TV drama, as we tried before as most webasites cover basically everything in some form. It's a lot easier to find websites that have common links in such as music news and games, than it was for TV drama where we were trying to link up things like East London, BBC and Spin Offs. It is also easier doing it alone on my laptop rather than as a whole class on the whiteboard. Not only is it a lot easier to write down the sites, i don't have to rely on other people to do the research. In the time i was allowed to work on the map, i think i did quite well. I managed to complete at least 3 of the lines, complete with interlinking stations. Unfortunately, the file was too big to e-mail home and i don't have a memory stick so i have been unable to do any work to it over the weekend and can't do it on Monday as we will be at Coleridge. I am confident i can get it finished, and if people decide it's any good it will be ready to go in.

Thursday 11/3

Today i finished compiling the list of websites i could use on the Underground Map and starting putting them an image ofthe underground map using Photoshop. This is a long and very dull process, but if it works, should hopefully be very rewarding by the end of it. I spent a while researching minor details, such as the font used on the Underground to make it look as realistic as possible. I am hoping that when completed, if you don't really look at it, you wont notice it's different. Unfortunately, as 'transport for London' or someone owns the copyright to the font, you have to pay to use it. I found a similar looking one that looks basically the same. Hopefully you will only notice it isn't actually an underground map when you actually stop to read it. You can see on the image i replaced one of the names in the key so you can see how close i was to replicating the font they used.

Wednesday 10th

Today started off badly. I didn't have any anything to do, because the article i was asked to write up i finished ages ago and nobody told me to change it or gave me any extra work. After kicking about for the first lesson, i gave Alex my article to read through. He read through it, crossed bits out, added bits in and generally doodled on it. This was good, because it meant i could come home and make the changes necessary for the article to improve. He didn't change anything drastic, most of it was just simple re-wording of sentences or phrases left, as i have a tendancy to be very informal. Second lesson i came back and read through the changes. I also looked through the exam specs, trying to think up some questions i could sent to some practitioners. This was difficult as the specs were very vague and not partcularly helpful, so we asked Pete and he helped us come up with questions. Once we got the first few done, it was a lot easier to think up some more.

I don't exactly have contacts in the industry, or none that i could rely on for much, but i know a few people that will happily answer questions and reply to e-mails i send. I was going to e-mail a director i know, but figured the internet probably hasn't changed his career much as he directed, like, Casualty or something. How people watch it may have changed but how it's made probably isn't affected. Instead, I decided to e-mail MC Lars. MC Lars, while not exactly mainstream in popularity, has quite a collective following and always seems to be happy to answer any e-mails he is sent. I figured as his career is very much involved in the internet, he's in his 20's, he knows the internet, and is very much dependant on it for his career, it would be interesting to see his opinions of web 2.0, compared to other artists who aren't quite as 'plugged in'.

He's also one of few artists i know that sees music piracy as a good thing, because it's just hitting a new audience with his songs, and has released at least one 'torrent only' album. I thought this would be good as it's a very big topic in media at the moment, and lets face it - other than kids, most people are against it. These are the questions i sent him:

When did you start making music?

If so, how did you get it known?

How much difference has the use of the internet/web 2.0 made in distributing your music?

Did the introduction of YouTube and Social Networking change your audience?

How has the internet and 'torrenting' effected your chosen career?

Has your audience changed much since your music became more easily available?

Has the way you advertise your music changed as the internet got more popular?

The Quality Control Team were also working together to come up with a
name and logo for the newspaper. After stopping everyone from what we were originally doing and getting us to write down ideas for names, they decided which one they liked best and asked someone in the class to make a logo. I was prety bored and didn't have much to do while waiting for Alex to finish so we could make up the questions, so i doodled an idea for a logo on the corner of my page. Even though it was originally just me doodling, one of them saw it and quite liked it so they asked me to do it bigger and submit it as an actual suggestion. Originally it was just the MEDIA bit, as the name they decided on was Media Me. I then doodled an arrow pointing back to the 'me' bit in case people didn't work it out. Then i realized it looked kinda like a face so gave it eyebrows and a nose.

Wednesday 10th

So i started on the Tube Map. The first thing i did was get a list of all the Lines that make the underground system, and how many stations each of them stop at. After putting them in order (most stops first)i had to try and decide how many websites i could think of for each thing. After each idea, i put a couple of examples of websites i could use for each thing. Google, i set as Kings Cross, because you can find everything from Google. Not all lines go through it, though, so, for example the District Line (Social Networking) doesn't go through Google because Google in itself isn't a Social Networking Site.

District – 60

Piccadilly – 53

Northern – 50

Central – 49

Circle – 45

Metropolitan – 34

Hammersmith and City – 29

Jubilee – 27

Bakerloo – 25

Victoria – 16

Waterloo and City – 2

For some reason, when i try and put my reasons on the blog, Blogger come up with masses of errors and puts big orange squares all over everything, so i will include it as an image

Tuesday 9th

Today 'Ghost Dave' came to talk to us again. He was explaining the different things we could put in the newspaper and what they are. This is basically what he said, but i went into more detail.

For any new article, you need to decide if it is relevant, will people care and WHO is likely to care. If you put an article about the financial distress of some company on the front page if the Sun, you aren't going to sell that many copies. You need to know your audience and relate any articles included to what they would want to read.

You should also only write about what you can get more information on. There's no point making an article about something that you read on Wikipedia or heard from your mate down the pub. If you can find it that easily, so can anyone else. You need to have the inside scoop. People will read newspapers to find out things they otherwise might not know, not because they prefer it to Wikipedia.

For research, Wikipedia is a really useful tool, providing you can verify any facts that you find on there. There's no point in using facts that have been made up, but there's no point disregarding Wikipedia simply because anyone can edit it. Try and find an expert in the field you are writing about and ask them their opinions. How things actually work, what's actually going on instead of what someone else has heard.

You need a fresh angle on a story if it has been done before. This angle very much depends on the style of the newspaper. For example, a newspaper like the Independant is going to have a very different take on any given event than a newspaper such as, say, The Sun. A good example of this is Michael Jacksons death. If you search that on the Sun's website, you get very different articles than you do from searching it the the Independant's website. The Sun seems very more about gossip and what could have happened and is made from rumours and guesswork, apparently. The Independant's angle was more "This happened, this happened. A film is coming out" It's very to-the-point, and skips over the main issue, as it's not their style.

The tone of the paper is important, too because is changes how the product feels. You can have news, opinion pieces, features, interviews and advertorial thigns in a newspaper. An opinion piece, as the name suggests is very biased. Think Charlie Brooker's Screen Burn column for the Guardian or David Mitchell's weekly column for the Observer. The feature could be about the history of a specific product, how to do something and just a main feature of the paper. Interviews can be done in two basic styles, either introducing the interviewee and basically saying what he/she has done and said, or in a Q&A format.

New Project

I have come to the conclusion that while i like the idea of including the Wikipedia Game in the newspaper, there is just nothing to write about it. I can't do research about it, there aren't articles about it to annotate and i'm the one who told the others about it. This makes doing any further adjustments very hard, as apart from just letting other people read it and give me feedback there really isn't anything else to do.

After bugging people to give me more work to do, i decided that i would try and complete a web 2.0 Tube Map. I know we tried to create one as a whole class using TV drama, and never managed to finish it, however i think if i am working alone, doing all the research and just getting on with it instead of relying on other people to do things, i should be able to get it done. It should be easier as websites generally share more common traits than TV shows, as if every TV show was the same, nobody would watch them. The internet, however, can have every website as similar as it wants, people would still use the same ones every day. Somebody created one for the Tokyo Underground, so i can use this for reference, and use it to see how they linked things together, which should make this task easier.

Monday 8th

Today i typed up an exam answer for our paper. I assume it is meant to go in the paper to help students work out what they should put in their answers. I really hope this person didn't get a fantsatic grade as it was horrible to read.

I also hassled Alex to send me the questions that they want sent to the media practitioners, but for some reason they have no idea where or what they are.

I also have my plan for what i aim to achieve in the second week of this project.

Use of internets and stuffs

I, like many internet users, don't spend a great deal of time searching around for new and exiting things to pop up on the web. When I load up Firefox, my internet browser, the first page is the Llama Lords homepage. Llama Lords is a gaming clan I am part of, it started a few years ago. Really, it was a bunch of people who all lived around Littleport and Ely who were just gaming together, then it got slightly more mainstream as we started playing bigger games. We started to recruit people from all over the world and became quite close with several of them. Occasionally we would recruit someone and find out later that they were quite local and we met up and made friends we would otherwise never have known. We have had several members from different countries come over to meet us and we have had a couple of gatherings with people form all over the place. We were mainly playing CS:S (Counter Strike: Source), and we had a few servers and a clan of a couple hundred people. I loved this, if you contributed to server costs we were granted admin powers on our servers to change settings and control who comes on the server to play. We then evolved through to different games like Team Fortress 2 and Left 4 Dead. These never worked quite as well, and as people stopped playing as much due to other commitments - some people went off to get married, some went to uni, others just gave up - the income lowered and we couldn't afford the servers. I still play with the remainder of the clan, but it's not as big as it used to be and a lot of people have just given up, but we keep the website and the Forum up and running as they are easy to maintain.

After checking that, I slide over to Hotmail, so I can check my e-mails. This generally doesn't take very long so my next move is straight over to FaceBook. In and of itself, FaceBook is quite dull. I don't add people I don't know, so I dopn't use it to make new friends, I rarely talk to people on there I DO know, because I either talk to them every day or just have nothign to say to them. I use FaceBook because everyone else does and I have nothing better to do. I use it to update my status' which is rarely anything important and I use a ton of 'Apps'. As with millions of other FaceBook users, I have my own farm, courtesy of FarmVille. I have a small patch of grass, which I can pretend I am growing assorted crops and raising animals and stuff. FarmVille is one of the most popular online games ever apparently, and for the life of me I can't think why. I guess there are some people like me that just don't have anything better to do, but I certainly wouldn't go on the game to do something fun. It's free, which is probably one reason, but if you want the super cool and interesting animals or decorations or features, you have to pay REAL MONEY to get GAME MONEY to buy stuff on the game. I also have a restaurant, a fish tank, a weird pet house thing and assorted other useless features of the site. The restaurant one at least has some point towards it. At a stretch, you have to try and get more money and points than your friends, but you can trade ingredients with your friends to improve the quality of your dishes. The more you think about these games, the more sad they seem. There are other games, however that you don't even get to customize or change in the least. You just click on different buttons and nothing really happens but you get experience and money. These games are even more dull as they aren't even particularly visually interesting.

Once i've completed this trivial routine of signing into things and wasting time playing these ridiculous games, I sometimes wander over to Reddit or fmylife.com. Reddit is basically a site where people post things and you can up-vote or down-vote them depending how much you like it. If something gets up-voted, more people are likely to see it, if it gets downvote nobody will ever see it. Fmylife.com is a site where people tell short stories about things that have gone wrong in their lives. It is a surprisingly up-beat site, and the things are usually quite humorous that are liely to make people laugh. A sort of schadenfreude type thing going on. Someone else getting pleasure from a strangers pain. I check Twitter, but I don't follow people and don't care for it that much.

That's basically all I use the internet for.

Friday

On Friday, i spent a large portion of the lesson writing an article about how students learn. Ash and Alie helped create this, and we all wrote about different things that enable students to learn. We found several very useful websites with lots of information on about the different ways in which students learn, but a lot of it we did simply from prior knowledge of how we, personally learn. One thing i thought was very important to be included int he article was something i had noticed but never really thought about and that is the students 'comfort zone'.

Whilst i was reading an article about this, i started to realise how true it actually was, and that it is a very important factor in enabling students to learn. Or it certainly is for me, anyway. If you are happy in the environment you are told to work in, you tend to work better and focus more. This is very very true from my perspective, however i guess it might change from person to person, it depends how big your comfort zone is.

Ideas for Newspaper

Today we came up with a list of idea for things we could put in our newspaper. Here is a list of basically all the ones we came up with. A few were removed for just being silly:

A 'Dear Mike' Section. As we only have one issue, nobody will have the chance to write in, but we could always get the questions from students beforehand and come up with the answers for the print.

Criss Cross/Wordsearches/Crosswords - Always fun, but have to media related, which could be a bitch.

Wikipedia Game - Could be difficult to make it educational, but i've started to write up a first draft.

Past Exam Questions and Revision Tips - easy enough, but we have to get them from somewhere and get permission to use them, i would assume.

Student and Teachers Voice Section - Chance for students and teachers tohave their say on the courses and work they have to do (?)

History of the Internet - Good idea, but i'm not sure how relevant it will be for our exam.

How Twitter Saved a Country - No idea, but Loz seems to think it's true

Videos for the Blind - Someone came up with this idea, apparently forgetting newspapers can't play video.

Photos of Students Working - Someone knows how to party.. Maybe in an article but stand-alone this shouldnever be included..

Home Made 3D Cinema - If you can get this to work go nuts. Could be fun.

Comic Strip/Photostory of a Media Student - Doesn't sound marvellous so far but whatever

Competitions - Would be good to see if we got anyone to actually respond, but ultimately we don't have anything to give away.

Timelines - I assume of the history of media and stuff

Red Bull - Something about a giveaway. Left in because could just say we can ask them for advertising. Several companies could benefit from adverts in a thing like this.

Pub Quiz - I assume just a quiz will do as i am NOT renting out a pub..

Technological Revolution and Future of Technology - Can just steal stuff from the Gadget Show for this, they're about as up-to-date as you're going to get.

Fact or Fiction - A bunch of myths/rumours about media stuff. We have to find some, i suppose..

Gorillaz - Band. Write about them?

Nick Character Profile - Wonderful idea, not necessarily helpful for other classes though

Sleep Revision - Can listening to revision tapes in your sleep help you to learn?

Exam Outlines - What is expected of you in the exam?

Media Llamas - Again, love it, but it has to stick to the topic.

Colour by Media Words - Like colour by Numbers but more relevant

Interactive Items - Again, a newspaper - not sure how this would work?

Keep language informal like in other teen magazines like game magazines and stuff

Get advertising from people

Thursday 4th

Today Kirk made us think up some questions that could be used in a questionnaire. Each member of the class had to write down a question on a piece of paper, which was then put in a box. When he had collected all the questions, the group leader had to pick 3 of them back out of the box. We then had to combine these questions into one slightly bigger question. This seemed like a bizzare idea as i don't see why one long comlex question is any better than 3 short questions, but it's what we were told to do. Ours wasn't too hard, as the questions were all asking if they thought this or that would be helpful so we just changed the way it said things.

I think Pete is meant to be taking this questionnaire to some other school so we can get some idea of what they would like to see in our magazine thing so it's not such a small group of people we ask. This would be good because we can get a more varied idea of what people would want in a revision newspaper thing. Unfortunately, it could ruin everything if everyone at Long Road says they want colour and pictures and activities and the other school are all like "We just want text. Size 12. Times New Roman." We're at a somewhat relaxed school and everyone seems more chilled out, which could be a problem if the other school is like Hills where my view of them is that they're much more up-tight and dull.

Thoughts of Layout

We looked at a couple of magazines Hayden bought in that were apparently aimed at our age range. I'd never heard of the magazine before and i can safely say i'll probably never look at it again, it's just not my kinda thing. Apparently, though, to aim things towards teenagers the main thing is COLOUR. We don't really need to have any sort of format, apparently we like things looking like a mess as if it had all been compiled at the last minute and just thrown together. Formalities are for suits. Random colours and seemingly random massive text seems to be some form of minor rebellion.

Drawings and doodles seem to go down really well, and basically have everything as simple as can be. Nobody really wants to read more than they have to for some reason, so make text massive and have as few words as possible. If this was a recurring thing, we could have an "Ask [someone]" page, but it's only one issue. I suppose we could ask people for questions before the release and put those in. Mainly people need to be able to relate to what you're talking about. There's no point talking to your grandparents about Facebook and The Pirate Bay - they won't get it. Similarly, there's no point talking to kids about videodisks and halogen lamps. WE JUST DON'T CARE! We have to target the right audience, which will be a pain because the media industry has such a variety of people it will be hard to please them all with the same thing.

Stuff to do.

We need, as a class, to create a flat plan, that should show all 12 pages of our paper. We then need to separate them to decide who gets what. I most newspapers, the front is full of the interesting bits that are vaguely worth reading and may interest some people, and as you get further in the news gets more and more dull until you reach the sport.

We don't want our paper to do this, as we want to keep it interesting the whole way through. I have drafted one article already for the newspaper, our team will go through it and see if there are any changes to be made.

We also need to work out when the deadlines are. The deadlines we have to meet are:

Flat Plan - We must have decided who is doing what on what page.
Resource Check - Check our facts are correct and none of the information has been made up.
Copy - Compile our work to make sure we have enough and nothing has been done twice (?)
Final - Re-Check all work for errors.
Print - Make sure we have enough time to send all the work off to the printers.

Between the Final and Print deadlines, we need to be converting all of our work into PDF format so it can be easily printed.

Dave!

So Dave came in today to talk to us about publishing and how it works and stuff. He's done loads of freelance and in-house stuff or something so he knew his stuff.

Basically, the big cheese is the Editor. Working for him is usually a deputy editor and an art editor. Below them are the assorted section editors and below them are the general shmucks that are writing the articles and doing the work.

When the low-level monkeys have finished a document, it is sent to the production editor, who sends it to the art director, who sends it back to the production editor. It is then sent back and forth between the production editor and the editor while they argue about minor changes until they come to a compromise.

Basically:

Raw Copy -> Sub Copy -> To Art Dept. -> From Art Dept. -> To Caption Dept. -> Final Checks -> Send off.

Project

We are making a 12 page, full colour tabloid newspaper. It is meant to contain study materials for people looking to sit the A2 critical perspectives exam. We will work in groups to research, plan and produce the newspaper using our own case studies, learning plans and lesson activites. These should be detailed enough to be used by students and teachers in post 16 education. We also need to find people to put ads in the paper to cover production costs. The paper shoudl be visually interesting, engaging and specific to the exam. It can have basically whatever we want in but it all has to relate to media and the critical perspectives exam.

I have created a table of what i aim to achieve each week, and what i actually get done in each lesson.

Xtended Project Q&A

When we were given the brief for our project, Nick told us to come up with some questions about it so we weren't sitting around going 'what the hell are we doing??'.. Here is a list if questions and answers from today:

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.

Final Job Roles

So Nick counted up the votes and the Jobs are the following:

Liaison - Alex

As the liaison, it will be Alex's job to converse with both the client and the tems making the newspaper.

Quality Control:

Evidence - Tara
Schedules - Kirk
Reflection - Mike

Teams:

Red Team: Loz - Matt H, Dave and Hayden
Blue Team: Philippa - Alie, Joe and James
Gold Team: Sam - Matt L, Ash and Me..

The names in bold are the team leaders, these are the people in charge of each group and are there to make sure that everyone in the group has plenty of work to do.

I think this could work. I have worked with everyone in my group on other projects so i know i can work with them, which is good but it does mean i don't get the chance to work with people i haven't worked with so much before. Ah well, could be worse i guess..

Job Roles

So today we had to nominate who we thought would be best suited for each role. Given that half the class didn't turn up today, they have no control over what job they are put in for so they can't turn around and demand to be in charge, because they missed the one day they would have that opportunity.

While a lot of people would have wanted themselves to be in the higher up roles, liaison and sort of commanding roles, i was quite happy to step back and put myself down to just work in a team. I know that i have been nominated to do some higher up stuff, but really i don't mind. I know people that would be better at it than me and would rather they did it.

I put Kirk down as the liaison because he's pretty reliable at turning up, i believe he would be confident enough to go to London on his own, should he need to (which several members of the class didn't seem too cool about) and he is hella good at organisation. He can talk between the quality control and the client and i think he will manage very well.

My choice of quality control people i believe were justified, because it will require lots of work and talking and meetings, so i chose people that i think would prefer doing that kind of thing instead of just sitting around typing up case studies and stuff. As a lot of the work will be more keeping track of what's going on, making sure people stick to deadlines and are constantly working, i chose people that would do well in these positions and not just get bored and start messing about. They were the hardest roles to fill because you are counting on the people to work well and efficiently because without them it just can't work.

The 3 group were the easiest to put together. I basically selected people i knew worked well together and put them in a group. I tried not to put too many people together who are unlikely to turn up, but sometimes it's better to simply try and avoid conflict than make people work with each other all the time. For example, there are some people in the class who just can't work with others in the class. It's not that they're being awkward or fussy, some of them have legitimate reasons and just aren't compatible, so i tried to keep them in separate groups.

I put myself in a group with Alie, Philippa and Alex. I would probably have put to work with Tara and Matt again, but i have worked with them a lot and think i should work with other people. I know i get on well with the other 3 people in the group, but i haven't really worked with them much. I think this group would work really well and i hope Nick doesn't mess it up!

Initial Thoughts

Realistically, i suppose it's good to have experience making something other than videos, but i don't really want to go into newspaper publishing so i don't really care. If it works out, it could be alright and it'd be nice if we could keep one of them as a sort of 'look-what-i-did' kinda thing.

I think making us select who does what is going to be a mistake, as usual but we'll see how it plays out. It could be fun!