What ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

We have now finished our newspaper and two ancillary tasks which consists of a poster and radio advert for our A2 Media studies practical production.

We tried to stick to conventions of current local newspapers because we knew that these styles and methods used for newspapers worked and people bought them, we didn’t want to stray too far away from the conventional look as that might deter the potential buyer from purchasing our newspaper over another.

We have created our newspaper following various conventions of real newspapers you can find in your local area. Our newspaper front page contains many things you would find on a newspaper front including a masthead which has our logo and title. We also had a slogan which reflects the logo which we found a common theme in local newspapers.


We mimicked the layout of newspapers we looked at with headlines and picture placements, using newspapers which we had a good accessibility to such as the Portishead Times we looked at many of their issues to find the most frequently used layouts for stories and pictures. For example having the text on the left hand side of the page and the picture on the right, also including a bar on the side containing details of other stories/elements you could find inside the newspaper. Another element on the front page we noticed was used frequently was a bar under the masthead containing small but important details about the newspaper such as the date it was published, the price and a link to its website.


We looked at various adverts in newspapers and singled out the most common features of them, they were often pretty simple designs, which appeared "cheap and tacky" we tried to replicate this and made very basic adverts. Things that made the adverts look so simple were the use of bold blocks of colour and bold clear fonts. There is little use of photo editing or effects to manipulate the colours; basic fonts you would usually find bundled with an operating system are used.


Our productions follows conventions consistently and pretty much follows the tried and tested format of modern day newspapers, there are instances where we went against conventions for example in our Celebrity spot of the week section which was an original idea where readers can send in their photographs of themselves posing with celebrities and have it featured in the newspaper. We added this to have a bigger emphasis on community and thought we could link it to other media such as a website (if we were to actually create the product) where we could post all the photos, so ones not featured could still be viewed by the public.