Media Evaluation

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and convections of real media products?  As a group we decided to structure our piece almost straight away as we thought in terms of structure that this would help all of us throughout. We decided amongst ourselves who will do which part during our show and came to the conclusion of: Ashleigh: Main news Lydia: Entertainment news Leanne: Gig review Ben: Sports news  We got this from all the other radio stations we have listened to in the past, eg. Radio one, Signal one.  We decided to make the language of our pieces quite informal as we wanted this to appeal to our target audience as much as possible.  The news we produced was quite a soft news, as we wanted it to be ’short’ and ’snappy’. I thought as I viewer that by making our piece more like a magazine show I.e ‘The one show’ it could appeal more to our target audience as everything the listeners would want to hear will be involved. This would help us interact more with the listeners.

How does your media product represent particular social groups?  We aimed our product on a particular age group and our stereotypical view was a lot similar to ourselves, as our target audience was young college like students who are hard workers yet love to have fun. They are very fashionable and extremely up to date with the latest looks, fashion and music.  We represent the social group as hedonistic. As throughout our piece we view our audience as middle class. Listening back on our production we made a point about EMA, and commented on car insurance. It has increased such a lot recently, so students need to start saving their EMA money.

What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?  Due to our target audience, South Cheshire college would be our main priority as we could give them everything they need, such as all the local news and updates.  If we were to broadcast our news bulletin further, I think by taking it to other school, colleges and universities would be a good option, as we could base our production on their local area and give them everything they would want.  Bauer media are a company in which we would compete against as they own a wide range of media companies. I.e Karrang, Kiss, Bliss, Heat, Closer and so on, because of their attitude towards the media industry, they would make it a lot harder for our radio production to compete as because they own so many smaller companies their standards are set extremely high.

Who would be the audience for your media product? Our target audience was based around us, Electrobuzz. We found that by basing our audience on us would make it much easier as we know exactly what we want in terms of news, fashion, and music. Our audience: Young, college like students who are hard workers, yet love to have fun! They are intrigued to find out the latest looks, fashion, and music updates

How did you attract/address your audience?  As our audience was a lot like ourselves we came to a conclusion straight away of addressing our audience in the best way possible. We decided to give them a news bulletin that they would love to hear.  A good structured piece was the idea that we were looking for:  Short, snappy news that they would actually be interested in. Eg, EMA was the first story in the bulletin due to its importance in the lives of a SCC student. This story would therefore grab the attention of the listener.  Weincludeda funny story of the week to make it address the audience in the best way possible, as listeners ourselves we knew what wewould want to hear. The funny story ended the bulletin on a high giving the bulletin an upbeat feel. Our choice of stories was based on creating an energetic broadcast based on our questionnaire findings – short snappy news, without long-winded political items.  Throughout our piece we tried to make it as casual as we could by having more of a conversation rather than giving a completely boring piece that wouldn’t catch their attention. We included beds and jingles which were recent, catchy beats to make sure that the young target audience would love our piece.  We also used colloquial language, to some extent, to add to this relatively ‘casual’ and energetic show.

What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?  At the start of our radio production I didn’t understand a lot on the technology used, I didn’t think that I would ever understand the use of it but surprisingly I did. I found out such a lot just by being inside the studio and recording. I learnt how to record a sound and edit it in the way we wanted, but in order to do this, we had to make a mistake to make it right.  I learnt all about the changes in levels and how to adjust the mixing desk levels to ensure that there is no distortion.  Once our piece was complete we then had to edit it, and in order to do this we had to understand the terms of transferring our recording to the computer and overlapping each others recording to make everything fit together. It took a while to make sure I understood exactly, but I did it eventually and was pleased with myself that I learnt so much in a short amount of time.  Before we had even started to record, our group practised some short recording using a mini-disc player to reate a ‘vox-pop’ and I learnt the use of this, the levels, the microphone and the actual recording.  As well as all this I learnt how to relate our structure with our script and in terms of this I had to be fully aware of the sound codes, language, jingles and beds.

Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?  Throughout the whole of our production I have progressed a lot as at the very beginning I was not fully aware of the terms in the radio production.  Our first ever task was the Funky Profile and I learnt from this that the recording industry was not just simple, I learned that you can not just record something without taking actions before hand. From making this mistake at the very beginning it gave me the chance to take actions when coming to actual production.  Research and planning was one of the main topics that I discovered and I made sure that I was fully aware at the start of the production and went straight into planning what I was to do each week and researching my main stories and target audience.  From this I then went onto making questionnaires and finding out some results, this all went towards our groups research.  Each week our groups production meeting succeeded and when we started to script our piece we were so glad that we had final structure as we could go straight into what each person had to say.  We realised once reading through the script as a group that the radio was a blind medium and some of our outcomes were changed. We needed to make sure that our audience felt comfortable to listen to us, so listening back throughout helped us.