News Talk

The newspaper front page

The website page

The Facebook page


The Twitter page


The Instagram page

1. Explain your role/responsibility within the team and the task. What were you required to do? 

Working with Abbie and Oliver, our task was to work on the Mirror's newspaper front page. This involved choosing which of the selected stories would be the main article with the headline and which of the others would be secondary stories. We had to decide on the layout of the cover page in addition to producing standfirsts and captions and gathering pictures to match our articles. 

2. For one media form, describe the codes and conventions you chose to follow and explain your intended impact.

As The Mirror is a tabloid newspaper, we included simplistic vocabulary such as 'shoddy'. Other examples include; 'confused', 'shocked' and distress', which convey emotion for each article in every caption, moreover, the straightforward language is easier to understand.Since in tabloids have a higher picture to text ratio, we also employed this convention using a large splash of British politician David Davis for our headline story and a slightly smaller photo of  chips and a blurred severed finger for our 'Finger Frozen Fiasco' story and little images for our other secondary stories. In our puff, an advert for Tesco's Christmas pudding can be seen which is a sign of the social status of the class of the readers of The Mirror, lower classes (C2,D,E audiences). 

3. Explain how your choices reflect the real newspaper's values and target audience. 

Choosing a political topic of the Brexit deal as our main story displayed the Mirror's political view clearly demonstrating that this particular tabloid newspaper is left-winged depicted with negative adjectives: 'diabolical' and shoddy' over the Brexit deal. The skyline featuring Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, is there to tempt readers of lower socioeconomic classes to venture further into the newspaper, this article is a reflection of the newspaper's target audience.

4. Explain how your team adapted the news across the three different media forms and the reasons behind your decisions. 

The headline story for the front page newspaper in print was on the Brexit deal, our reason to use this story as our main article is because it showcases The Mirror's political view which is anti-Brexit for their left-winged audience. Since the online versions of the newspaper are more widely read by younger audiences, we placed the story on Iraq as our main article on their website and Facebook page which capture their attention. However, on the Twitter page, we used an article on Donald Trump due to the fact he has a large presence on this particular social media site whereas on Instagram we applied a story on Prince Harry and Meghan Markle because Instagram conventions are aesthetically pleasing photographs which promote positivity and happiness.

5. In hindsight, is there anything about your team's outcomes that you would adapt or improve? 
To improve our outcome I think we should have used the font that The Mirror uses across their multiple issues. I think we could have sized our pictures and sections of text better.