Planning

The planning process is vital if you wish to create a professional looking piece of work, and looking back at my planning this is one area I wish I spent at least twice as long on. As later on in the process of developing not only the newspaper but also the subsidiary task I had to start from basically a blank canvas and produce a rushed and below par standard piece of work, I feel this particularly shows on my poster.

The page above is what I scanned in and it is what I personally believe a newspaper front cover should include


Above is a rough plan of the font cover, on the right hand side you can see I have listed a number of options I could use for the logo and the name of my newspaper. There are also a few different topic stories I selected from a brainstorm, and marked as strong possibilities for the main story. To help me choose what logo, name and stories I should use I carried out a questionnaire of which I handed out for family, friends and peers and the results came back the anchor logo gaining 100% of votes and the name Portishead Post gain a majority of the votes but it was closely follow the Somerset Supplement. But in terms of the story used I chose myself as I thought it would be out of the norm for a local newspaper to cover a death.

Below is another rough plan giving me another option for a front cover.



The image on top of this text shows what I feel should be included with an inside page.


Above is the planning for the inside pages for the project I initially created two inside pages but later found out only one was need. After finding this out I decided to us the right hand page as I felt it had better stories and was laid out better then that of the left hand page. I chose to have no advertisement on the inside page as I would not be getting marked on how well I can create an advert but how well I can create a news story, even though professional local papers have a huge amount of advertisement and almost in every page.


Above is the finalised front cover, over all I’m happy with the result. There are a number of things I have tried to recreate from existing newspapers. One of them is on the top banner, you can see it is split into three sections which include what will be in the newspapers, then paper I have used this from is the Evening Post. Another thing used in professional papers is the litter colouring of text below a head line which gives you a tad more information e.g. ‘Husband arrested over woman’s death page 2’. One area I feel needs improvement is the photos used I don’t feel they are of good enough quality to be in a front cover, the reason that they are still there is I didn’t pay enough attention to them before I published my finished project. If I spotted they were to dark then I would swap them with other ones I’ve taken with better lighting quality. Finally the area on the front cover I’m most pleased with is the anchor used as the logo. It is only a small thing but I was chuffed with it and really pleased how it looks. I done it by splitting an image and then shading in one side, then going round the outside of the other image then finally joining then up again.


Here is the finished inside page. This in my opinion is the best part of my project, and I feel it the most professional looking page. In terms of the stories one of them is true in that a care home is under threat but I created my own story for it. My favourite headline is ‘theft of Bosch boiler is chilling’ I really like the pun I used and over all it is just a really good story. The top banner looks professional with it simplicity just with the date and page number. I also had fun creating the logo for the Somerset Care Home Foundation. I can just picture it on a letter head and was really impressed with my work there.