Media Product Evaluation

1. Media Product Evaluation Conor O’Hanlon

2. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? • I feel that our media product did use certain aspects of radio news station such as Signal 1 and Radio 1. As we analysed the conventions of these station through textual analysis. In our textual analysis we found that signal 1 and radio one both used things such as beds and jingles to make it sound busy and interesting, although signal 1 concentrated more on local news, whereas Radio 1 focused on national and international news, so we decided to use and develop the forms and conventions used more in signal 1. We did however try to challenge this by adding more local entertainment and targeting our stories towards a younger audience, which may challenge the traditional way of creating a news broadcast.

3. How does your media product represent Particular social groups? From our pitch, we stated that we wanted to create a media broadcast targeted at a younger, trendier audience. But in the end I found that the broadcast could reach out to older audiences due to our wide range of stories, showing that we did try to move away from creating a biased media product. However we did try to insert a lot of entertainment stories that may interest our initial intended audience, we felt that, stereotypically, a young trendy audience (possibly students) would be interested in listening to these stories.

4. What kind of media institution might Distribute your media product and why? Our media product may be distributed by companies such as bbc, as they do broadcast radio shows, which reach out to similar target audiences as ours . I feel they would be the best company to distribute our news bulletin also as it already distributes a wide range of broadcasts so I feel our broadcast could easily fit in with the company and be successful on it.

5. Who would be the audience For your media product? Our audience would be young, male or female, who would probably fit in the social grade of C1,C2,D and E. our audience would probably be interested in the “young” lifestyle, which includes entertainment and nightlife, shops, fashion and general news stories.

6. How did you attract/address Your audience? To appeal to our target audience, we firstly made sure that the beds and jingles suited our target audience, to create a fast, young sound throughout the media product. We used our knowledge as people in our target audience and the help of questionnaire results to use a script and news stories that our target audience would be interested in listening to. We tried to make sure our script showed differentiation throughout, and when we recorded we wanted to make sure our voices weren’t monotone, as this would loose our target audiences interest. We used mostly entertainment and leisure stories to address our intended audience, as we found from out questionnaire results that most of our target audience wanted to hear these stories on a news broadcast.

7. What have you learnt about technologies from The process of constructing this product? I have learnt firstly, how to do vox-pops to a good standard by checking sound levels, the mic length away from the mouth and the background noise, most of the vox-pops we produced were good quality I felt. I learnt to develop my techniques in the recording studio also, as I now know that I must make sure I try and make my recording as clean and clear as possible by not riffling the script or coughing for instance. Also I learnt how to edit for the first time, which I picked up fast, I developed my skills of how to make sure all the sounds we used had to link in, so that you can’t hear the changeover from one recording to the next, I did this by cross-cutting each of the recordings onto each other, and finding different beds and jingles which matched.

8. Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the Progression from it to the full product? After the completion of the final media product, compared to my funky profile, I now feel more confident in every aspect of media, whether that be production, recording, vox-pops, and editing. I now know how I can make any media product sound better and more professional in future, due to the experience of creating the final media product, as we needed to get rid of the faults involved with our news broadcast, so throughout the creation, I learned what needs to be changed and how to do it. I found that our team had to do much more planning than the funky profile this time, which will be important to do in future to achieve a good media product. I don’t feel that there was enough decent planning involved with the funky profile. All in all the experience of the production process of any media product and all tasks involved, help me to progress in the area of media.