Research and Planning checklist - Newspapers

Below is a checklist of what is expected in your blog for your research and planning.
There will shortly be attached links to example blogs which will show you the kind of detail expected.

Research and Planning Checklist

Local Newspapers

Research

·         Find and annotate 5 local newspaper front pages and an inside page from 5 newspapers.

Ideally these need to different newspapers and they also ideally need to be the matching inside pages to the front covers.

Annotate means you need to identify the key features of the pages using appropriate terminology (this can be done in powerpoint).

You then need to put this into a blog post which explains why the pages look this way.

·         Audience research – find out who reads newspapers, this can be done through surveys in school, home, town or by looking at different publisher’s websites.

 

·         Story research – what different types of story commonly appear on the pages you are looking at? It would be good to look at several newspapers to get a spread of story types.

 

·         Language research – how are stories structured? How are headlines written?

 

·         Format – how are they laid out? Do they follow a pattern?

 

·         Adverts – what type of adverts appear? How does this relate to the type of audience?

 

·         Logos/idents

 

·         Representation of local town and area – positive/negative?

 

Planning

·         You should have at least one draft of your front page done in pen/pencil and paper/MS paint before moving on to making it in InDesign

 

·         Stories – there needs to be evidence of those from mindmaps/bulletpointed initial    ideas through to the written story and ideally some drafts in between.

 

·         Photos – you need to show consideration of location, props, actors, costumes, a shooting schedule (when are you going to take the photos?)

 

·         Fonts

·         Headlines 

·         Title

·         Audience

·         Logo/ident?

 

• These all need to have at least one blog post each that discusses various options and your final decision and reason for it

• Throughout your planning you need to link each idea back to your research – you should be able to show where all of your ideas originate from even if you are developing/challenging a convention.