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

Our ancillary tasks to accompany our newspaper were a poster advertisement for a section of the newspaper and an advert for the newspaper to go on the radio.

When first deciding which ancillary task we wanted to create I researched a variety of newspaper websites and websites in general, I looked at the styles and conventions used including placements of buttons, usually under the masthead of the page or along the side of the page next to the main body, and article layouts which for newspaper articles usually contained small thumbnails you could click to see a bigger image which were integrated in the text. I looked into programs we could use to create the website which included Macromedia Dreamweaver and Apple’s iWeb. I eventually decided to change our ancillary task from a website to a radio advert as I thought it would be the more interesting and involving option.

To research for our poster we looked at various posters for other media texts for example film posters and looked at their various conventions. We then looked at posters advertising for newspapers and looked at the themes used there; we went on to use some of these themes in our production. Some posters we looked at were for the evening post, a newspaper local to us and we used several conventions from this which included using large bold letters to attract people’s attention.

Our use of a poster to accompany our newspaper works well as we can show a little more about whats inside the newspaper and add more volume to it. The poster follows a similar theme with the masthead being the same and the style and colours of blues and whites to match a sea location.

Our radio advert also matches our newspaper as it connects more with our target audience which is middle aged/ older generations by including older characters with real life problems which will encourage we hoped this would encourage our target audience to buy it. We also have a "modern" jingle giving out the information of the newspaper which also might encourage younger generations to read our newspaper.

We studied a variety of radio adverts though as it was difficult to find specific adverts for newspapers we looked at adverts in general to get the correct tone for our advert and make sure it will suit the newspapers themes by adding a sense of local community through the people talking in a local place and using jingles to make it seem more interesting.

Overall the two products work well with the main product and give a full rounded view of our newspaper. In the poster we included the masthead from the actual newspaper and the slogan and colour scheme which easily shows it’s linked to the newspaper. Similarly with the radio advert we included the slogan and the name of the newspaper.