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.
