XXL Double Page Spread 3 analysis-1st draft

XXL Double Page Spread 2 analysis-1st draft

XXL Double Page Spread 1 analysis-1st draft

Billboard double page spread analysis-1st draft

Billboard contents page analysis-1st draft

Billboard front cover analysis-1st draft

XXL 2nd contents page analysis-1st draft

XXL 1st contents page analysis-1st draft

XXL front cover analysis-1st draft

NME contents page analysis

Finished college contents page

College contents Page draft

Updated College magazine front cover

College magazine front cover

Plan of my college magazine

Analysis of existing college magazine

Evaluation of 'I feel like stealing some music today...'

Evaluation

Our magazine genre was music magazine therefore I researched many different magazines of this genre.  Rolling Stone magazine stood out to me and when I read the articles on their blog, it seemed to fit in with my brief and how I wanted to construct my article.

Even though my article was for Rolling Stone, I added things stereotypically from other magazines e.g.  Witty captions like in Stylist Magazine. I also know that Rolling Stone is an American magazine, but I wanted my target audience to be British.

Firstly, I had to research and understand the topic of piracy in the Music Industry. We were all given an article from Newsbeat which gave me an overview of the topic. We had class discussions which gave me an insight into a variety of opinions, (not necessarily their own).

We then did independent research. I found quite a few good facts and figures before realising they were all from the RIAA website which my British audience would not relate to. I then googled BPI and found a load of facts, figures and surveys of which I extracted the information I think my target audience would be most interested in. I looked around a little bit more and found more figures from musicweek.com which I have used in my article.

I had already written my article when I remembered I should have information on celebrities talking about file- sharing to show more opinions. I had information on the celebrities against file- sharing as they were in the Newsbeat article given to me at the start; however I checked this information on Newsbeat to make sure it was true. When looking for celebrities pro file- sharing, I found a link to Perez Hilton’s blog which had an article about Famous people in favour of illegal site MegaUpload. I made sure this information was true by looking it up in more reputable websites such as Fox news and CNN. Even though this is an American story, readers would be interested in the big named stars.

I am very good at finding the information that I want and is relevant to what I am writing and who I am writing for, very quickly, but my downfall is that it takes me a while to realize the research that I would need e.g. I forgot about the celebrity opinion until after my article was finished.

I have always had an interest in journalism so writing this article was not very difficult. However, because we were given the Newsbeat article, I relied on this heavily when writing my own article.

When doing my research on Rolling Stone, I read a lot of articles on their blog, and used their writing techniques to form my own article. For instance, some of the articles were very serious but had humorous, informal undertones. For this article, I expected my readers to be young professionals between the ages of 25-35; therefore I made the article middle lexical with some informal language.

After I had finished writing my article, I started using InDesign. At first, it seemed quite easy as I was just fiddling around with layout boxes, however it became increasingly harder. I added my text to the page but soon realised that my text was not going to fit on one page. I tried to add another page to the first; however InDesign would not let me do that. I eventually had to restart InDesign and add the double page first before doing anything else.

After I had added my article to InDesign, I had to insert the pictures. It took me a while but I finally understood that you have to use both arrow buttons to move and fit your picture into the frame.

After I had finished with the article on InDesign, I tried to delete the guide boxes around the columns, but whenever I tried to delete the boxes, it would delete the text in the boxes.

I left this problem and tried to export the file to JPEG. I did what I was told to do, however the file only exported the last page. I then tried to Print Screen the article on Word and then post it to my blog, however when I clicked paste, nothing happened. I ended up with only my exported last page on my blog.

As I didn’t have my complete article on my blog, I asked around for verbal feedback. I tried to get feedback from the target audience of this type of magazine as this would be more useful to me. The general feedback was very positive. I was told that my writing skills were good apart from one grammatical error (got instead of gotten in the sentence ‘probably gotten worst’). I was told that the first page looked more like an article in a newspaper and only the last page looked like the brief. I was also told that I should make my ‘Legal websites to get music from’ should stand out more, as it is hard to differentiate it from the text which caused a bit of confusion. I found this feedback very useful as I have more of an insight of what the target audience liked and what they did not like and how I can make it better. This feedback has made me realise that in future projects, I should ask the target audience for their ideas before I have finalised my article.

My targets for improvement will be:

·         Not to stick to one existing article to write my article around. For this piece of journalism, I relied heavily on the Newsbeat article; hopefully I will find a variety of texts next time to help me get an overview of the topic instead of a template for my own article.

·         To choose one magazine and stick to it. I used conventions from different magazines which have different target audiences which did not fit my brief.

·         To brainstorm all of the information that shall be used in the article instead of missing bits out and adding them in at a later date. I think next time it will be better if I have more information and cut bits out rather than have to fill white space.

·         Check where my facts, figures and information are from first, and see if this can be related to my target audience. I spent a lot of time on the RIAA site when I wanted my target audience to be British.

·         Take a bit of time to find out all about InDesign before I start use it. I wasted a lot of time starting my layout again because I didn’t take the time to understand how InDesign worked.

Introduction journalism piece:I feel like stealing some music today...

Production Schedule

Back Page of completed file sharing task

draft of file shaing task