In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

I believe my media product follows real media conventions through the layout. I tried to keep the layout similar to that of the newspaper I had researched. I found that 'The Times' was the most inspirational when creating my product. I liked the idea of keeping the masthead to the left hand corner of the page accompanied by the places in which you can purchase it. I liked the idea of adding the colour blue onto the page making it more interesting and vibrant. I basically used a combination of ideas from each of the exemplar newspapers below.



Another thing I considered was the headlines keeping only the first letter as a capital while the rest lowercase as if following either 'The Mercury' or 'The Times'. From researching I saw that each newspaper sticks to approximately three columns consisting of about 5 words per line, so I decided that was the way to go to achieve a professional looking newspaper. The actual text was something I had to consider also, I wanted it to sound friendly and achieve a community spirit. So after reading a few articles I got the gist of what they consists of.

Here is the initial design I decided on for my newspaper:

While following certain conventions, I also challenged them by designing something that combines all these ideas that I have collected from each newspaper. I decided that my newspaper had to be original and not copy exactly what each of these layouts consists of. By moving around the key elements of the layout I was able to create something different which still looks like a newspaper.

My feedback from my peers and teachers was also very positive as they all believed my newspaper followed real media conventions saying that it looked professional and realistic.