Feedback for the Newspaper

Mary Berrisford from Islington Sixth Form replied with this message when we were asking 
for feedback from the newspaper;

“We've just put the underground
map on the wall and are fighting about who is on the coolest line
(that's teachers not students by the way!)
Initial reaction is that we can't wait to use it in the classroom -
could be a few more bigger images in there...
We'll use it with students next week (weds) and email you some more
feedback”

Jenny Grahame from Media Magazine gave us this message when supplying us with some
feedback for the newspaper;

“MediaMe looks great.  Works really well with the colour, etc. Mega
achievement.”

Brian Mulligan from Reigate Sixth Form 

"- Good on section 1
- Methodical systematic and detailed
- Very concise to the point
- Very clearly expressed
- Wordsearch page blurry
- Wikipedia game Already played by lots of class good  -article- less obviously useful 
than others
- Useful - better than a textbook
- Great format
- Tube map great
- Format handy
- Teacher prefers online to print -students like print far more
- Layout really good
- Is point about TV  not needing a licence true?"


For 500 copies of the newspaper - £500 which inc VAT and postage for first three orders 
would be £11.40.

Our overall income from the newspaper;

advert Junction £350
advert Lincoln £100
advert OCR £100

Reigate sixth form - 120 copies - £60
Islington sixth form - 40 copies - £20
Netherhall sixth form - 30 copies - £15
Guernsey Grammar - 20 copies - £10

Total income so far = £655

free samples and copies for group members, moderator - 50

240 copies of the newspaper still to need to be sold.

It will cost us £511.40 to pay for newspaper in total and so far we have made £655 so we are 

already in profit and we have still got 240 copies of the newspaper to sell. 

Presentation on Extended Project

This is the presentation that I made to present at the end of the project but I then chose not to use it as the settings on the video have gone too fast so it is hard to read. The presentation went quite well without the Keynote and just using the newspaper for visuals was useful and effective.

Kirk's Job Role Video

Flat Planning Video - Sorting out Page Order

Flat Planning (Extended project) from cmdiploma on Vimeo.

Mike's Feedback on My Blog

Mike, from the quality control team, has been looking through each of our blogs to see what is needed to still be completed and to give us some feedback that we can improve on. He has looked through my blog and this is the feedback which he has given me.








I am now working on finding the videos on Kirks blog to put on to my blog and adding a few pictures to some of the rest of my posts.

Evaluation of Finished Newspaper

How well does it meet your original intentions?


I think that the overall outcome of our newspaper is quite good but I feel that the newspaper is very basic and I expected a lot more. I thought that as we are paying for colour that the newspaper would be a lot more colourful and be something that stands out. I think overall the articles look how I saw them turning out but I thought that we would have used more images and colours throughout to make them standout on each page. I thought that because this was new to us that we wouldn't be producing something that is very complex and I originally assumed that it would be quite simple, easy to read but I think that if we had worked harder we could have done a lot better to make it interesting.

How does it look?

The front page is quite basic, as it is laid out similar to the articles throughout the newspaper. The title is in a simple font, a primary red colour and the page layout is of simple columns of texts and four information boxes along the left hand side. A few logos are displayed on the bottom of the front page but there are no images on the front page and I think that this would have made the front page more appealing. The articles are also laid out within this sturcture and a few of them have images but I think that we could have done with few text and bigger images to draw people in to reading the articles.

How pleased are you with your contributions and how effectively did you work within your role?

I am quite pleased with my contributions and I feel that I have tried to complete my role as best I can but as with a lot of projects, I think there are some things I could have done better. I enjoyed my role as leader of the blue group as I feel I have not had a leadership role before and I enjoyed the challenge. I think that I could have enforced the tasks within my group a lot firmer as sometimes they were reluctant to work and some things may not have been completed on time. However, with persistance they did listen and take to the tasks with enthusiasm and determination.
I felt quite happy with completing the work for the articles and even though mine was not used within the paper, I was quite happy with what I produced but I thought that if I had spent some more time on it maybe it could have been left in. This was an interesting experience to see how it works within the business and having to make ruthless decissions was very good for all of us.

What could be learned from the experience?

I think that we have learned a lot from this experience as it has given us a clear insight into the business how hard it is to produce something that people want. I was hoping that this experience would help us work together within different groups and with different people but there were a lot of arguements and some people refusing to complete work so i don't think that this was completed to the best of our ability. I think that we learnt that you need to be able to work really hard to meet a deadline and that in some cases tough decissions need to be made to make the process a lot easier and work to meet the deadline. This was a good lesson because before hand we would have spent a long time trying to cut something down that we couldn't and it lose us marks but now having the experience of needing to cut something down - we are now more willing to do so.

31st March - Sessions Work

Today is our last session that we are able to work on computers to edit the articles so today is our deadline for all of the articles to be completed and given to our liaison. As my article has been chosen by quality control to not be within the newspaper but now online, I don't really need to spend anymore time today editing on it and it can wait until the newspaper is finished.

Alie, one of the group members, is not present today and she still needs a lot doing to her article before it can be classed as finished. I have decided that as I don't need to work on my article that I will work to get hers finished while she is not here so that our group can hit the deadline on time.

I started by creating a coloured block behind each heading within the article and also behind the title of the article. I thought that as most of the primary colours were taken from other people within our project, I would use pink so that none of the colours in different articles are the same. This colour also works with the person's opie picture and therefore makes the article as a whole more appealing.

I decided to go through her article making sure that all the text was spelt correctly, the fonts were all right and that the words that were meant to be in italics are in italics. I then went through her text trying to find pull out quotes, there were quotations she had made within her article, which I could then pull out of the text in a large font and therefore it would be something that would get the readers attention.

The finishing touches were then made to add the opie picture of Alie to the bottom of her article, sign it with her name and then to get it reviewed by quality control to make sure that it was all ready to be given to our liaison.

Mike's Feedback on my Blog

Mike, one of our quality control team members, has been giving us feedback on each of our blogs. This has been quite helpful because we can see someone else's view on our work and it helps us to improve. I have gone through the points that Mike has given me and worked through my blog to make the corrections that he thinks are needed, as well as working to improve my blog on a daily basis.

30th March- Decisions with my Article

Today I have been speaking with the quality control team and in particular, Tara our evidence helper within the quality control team. They have all been working together sort out how many articles we have and how the pages will be filled within the newspaper. They therefore have also been sorting through which articles will need to be cut down and or cut out of the newspaper completely.

Together they have decided that my article should be cut out the newspaper because it is not as relevant as the rest of the articles for helping students to revise. However, they have said that any articles that have not been put into the newspaper, will be put onto the website for the students to access.

Alie's Feedback on my Article - First Sub

Within our group we thought that it would be a good idea to print out our article how they are at the moment and to give them to a different member of our group to go through and say what we could change or improve. James was not present for this task so myself and Alie swapped articles, went through each others articles and once we were finished, we then both worked on James' article and then give it to him once he is back at college.

This was quite useful to us, as it gave us someone else view on what we could improve on and I think as myself and Alie are working on a similar topic, we had a lot we could share with each other to help us improve. As well as giving feedback, we also went through the article making sure that it follows the style house guide that the quality control team had produced. This meant that we had to look out for fonts, sizes, italics etc.

Below are two images of the feedback that I received from Alie.

29th March - Sessions Work

Myself and Alie have worked hard towards a deadline today. The quality control team have asked us to cut down our article from two pages to one page so that it fits within the newspaper efficiently. This was quite a hard task because we had to be very ruthless with our articles and we needed to cut our large amounts of text out of them.

My article was originally two pages, which included the image of my opie and also some links to some useful websites. I decided that the best way to go about doing this would be to read through my article and take out paragraphs or even individual sentences that are not needed within the article. As I went through my article, it became harder to take out big chunks of my text and towards the end I only had a small sentence that was into the next page. This where I really had to be ruthless and think of what the article could do without, so I took out some elements of my article that make it sound quite personal rather than general, therefore the feel to article then changed slightly.

This was interesting task and one the most challenging things that we had to complete for this project. This gave us a big taster into what the industry expects of its writers and how strict you have to be with yourself and the article that you are writing.

Plan for the Week 29th March - 1st April

I have completed another weekly plan, this one is for next week - 29th March to 1st April. This week will need a lot of attention, patients and hard work, as a deadline needs to be met and we have a lot of work to get done. We need to really work on getting advertisements from possible advertisers or this newspaper will not go ahead.

I have made a plan of what I we need to be doing each day next week and also baring in mind that we finish on Thursday, we may not have computers then so our main deadline would be Wednesday.

Image Ideas To Go In My Article

Now that my article is almost finished, I need to be gathering all of my images that need to go with the article. As my article is purely about Facebook, I think that gathering some images off my Facebook, some of website names, applications would be a good idea. I thought that because I break down some parts of Facebook within my article, that I should take screen shots of these parts, for example, I talking about 'events' so I have taken a screen shot of the 'event icon'.

I think that it would also be useful for the article if I were to take some images of myself or others using Facebook, this way it would give the read something that they would automatically be able to link with the article when they first see it.

Plan for the Week 22nd - 26th UPDATED

Here is an updated version of the plan for the week 22nd to 26th March. I have made a plan at the beginning of this week, which was started by showing what I plan to do and this updated version now shows what I have done, how it went and now what is needed to be done.

Feedback on My Teams Articles

Within our team, we have decided that it would be useful to all us if we gave feedback on each others articles. As we are all working on our own article, we may be able to share something to help others which the quality control team may not have been able to.

I have taken both of my team members articles, read through them and annotated them with what I thought they could improve on. Below are the images of the articles which I annotated.

Action Plan for 26th March

Today is quite significant within the production of this newspaper and we need to make sure that we get all of these tasks completed or we will be getting behind on some of our deadlines. I have decided to create a small lists of tasks that we need to complete, that my team needs to complete and also what I will need to be completing.

- We all need to open a style template which James has made, paste our article into it, make some alterations and then print out to review

- Within our team we also need to complete this, we also need to look other all our articles within the template and produced feedback. We all also need to be working on keeping our blogs up to date with the work which we are completing with the sessions.

- As team leader, I need to be making sure that the articles are being put into the templates correctly, that I am giving them plenty of feedback which they work on to make the article better and making sure they meet the deadline at the end of the day. I will also have to make sure that, as James is not here today, that his article is put within the template and also given feedback ready for him to look over on Monday.

26th March - Sessions Work

Now that we have a style template that we are trying out, we need to paste out our articles into this template to see what it looks like, to give feedback, see a flat plan and to see what needs to be changed. Below I have pasted some screen grabs of putting my article into this template and how we altered it once it was in place. It wasn't as simple as copy and pasting into our template, once the text was in place, we had to go through it putting the body text into the right font, making the headings of each section the right size and font and also the title needed to be in the right place and in the right font and size. This was simple process but my text seemed to come out in individual sentences so I had to go through all my text and back space it all - which took up large amount of time.

Once this was completed we then put our Opie pictures at the bottom of our article, along with our name. This was then printed off and we looked at them all within the flat plan. This was interesting as we found that we had 15 pages and are we only have 12 pages - this far too much and we need to cut down a lot of articles. My article is two pages long without pictures and I need to make sure that my article is cut down to one page which will include any images that I want to use. Alie, who is a member of my team, also needs to cut down her article which is slightly too long but not by much and the other member of my team has an article which is the right size, which helps our job a lot.

Third Draft of my Article

Has Facebook Effected The Way In Which We Socialise In Todayʼs Society?

Facebook is a social networking site which as been running since February 2004. It was slowly introduced along side other social networking sites such as Myspace, Bebo and now it is the most popular social networking site on the internet. I think this is because it allows anyone to add anyone, have conversations with friends and use its applications to do almost anything. It is bringing many people together, you are able to search for friends and in some rare cases you end up coming across someone you haven't spoken to in years and reconnect with them.

There have been many game applications which many people use out of boredom and a few of them have become quite popular to a point where non-Facebook users have heard of the 'addictions' to the game application. For example, there is a game application called ʻFarmvilleʼ, which I think no matter how long you have been on Facebook, you have used it at some point, even if you’ve never used it since. This game was made by a company called Zynga, who have also made 36 other games on Facebook which include ‘YoVille’ and ‘FishVille’. The game allows you to maintain your own farm, add neighbours and make coins to buy decorations for the farm. Coins are received from completing tasks on the games and these coins allow you to buy more accessories for your game. However, some items cost more coins than you may have or they may cost ‘cash’. Cash items are not available for you to earn throughout the game by completing tasks and to be able to get cash you have to send in money to Facebook via credit card or pal and how much you pay depends on how much cash or coins you may want for your game. Through some research on Zynga, I have tried to find out all the ways in which they profit from these games but this is their only source of income.

Whilst researching I found an article by Nicholas Carlson, on the Business Insider website, which briefly explains a bit about what Zynga is earning1. Nicholas Carlson claims within this article that ‘While the most aggressive reports we’ve seen so far peg Zynga’s revenue around $150 million, our banker says he understands the number is closer to $250 million.’ This information is quite useful and raises an interesting thought about online games, how they may be so addictive to some that they spend a lot of money on them or that they have become some of the most popular online games.

As well as game applications, they have applications where you can fill out quizzes and post your results on your profile page for other users to see and possibly then do the same. I use quite a lot of the applications on a daily basis, however, I have started to use more of the activities available on the site such as making events and groups. Facebook has progressed over the years and you are now able to make groups that anyone can join or make an event that anyone can go to. I have played about with this a lot recently, for example, making an event to go see the film Alice in Wonderland. I must admit, it was hard to get anyone to accept to the invite as I only wanted people I knew to be there and in the end we ended up not going.

There are a lot more successful events, such as, the Cambridge Strawberry Fair, which has 1,961 confirmed guests. The Strawberry Fair website2 explains the fair as ‘a free volunteer run community music, entertainment, arts and crafts fair.’ This is has become quite useful, as for most of us, years ago we would have to make several phone calls to make an event but with Facebook, as long as you are friends with the people you want to invite, you can make the event and it can be sorted within minutes.

1 http://www.businessinsider.com/zygna-revenues-are-closer-to-250-million-says-banker-2009-10 2 http://www.strawberry-fair.org.uk/

However, these events can be very useful and interesting but a few of them have been known to get out of hand. As you are able to put up any information that you wish and the event can be open for the whole world to attend, some people have made the mistake of showing their house parties online. The Sun has written an article on a teenage girl who pasted her private house party Facebook, which then turned out to become out of hand and the girl was said to be unconscious throughout this whole evening. The article was called ‘Facebook party house trashed3’ and was published on the 22nd of February this year by Guy Patrick and he writes about the disasters the family came home to and shows an interview with the father. This is one extreme case of Facebook events going wrong, and unfortunately there have been a few other cases. There was a severe amount of items stolen, property damaged and they claimed to have an estimated £10,000 worth of damaged. This was all cause by a suspected fifty unexpected vandals and the owner of the house claims that he saw them ‘bragging’ on Facebook and he aims to hand them names into the police. Within the interview, her father says; ‘Suddenly from being a small party for her and her mates from school it turned into a riot, with men in their late twenties turning up in cabs’.

To many people, Facebook has become the site that you can't really do without. Generally I don't think I would be able to get on with my daily life without the internet. Social networking has become part of my daily routine and I think that without it, we wouldn't talk to as many people and we wouldn't know much about what is going on. As Facebook has a message board as the 'homepage', where everyoneʼs status updates appear, I tend to see a lot of what they are up to and what is going on in the world outside of my life. I'm not really the kind of person that would watch the news and if anything serious, exciting or out of the ordinary has happened recently, it is bound to be in someoneʼs status at some point.

Status updates are also promoting tv programs and in some cases becoming a type of competition for them. Many members of Facebook like to discuss what they are currently watching on tv or what they enjoy to watch. These comments can sometimes effect the popularity of some shows, in both bad and good ways. Recently, a good example was the last two episodes of the fourth series of Skins which were shown on E4 on Wednesday 10th and17th of March. There seemed to be a large amount of students watching this episodes while on Facebook so I decided to observe them. On the 10th of March, there was a large amount of comments stating that were upset about one of lead characters being murdered and this seemed to make a big impact on others on Facebook at the same time. There was a discussion between about how upsetting the episode was but it caused a lot of interest and therefore this would be a positive for Skins. However, on the 17th of March, which was the showing of the last episode, there was a lot of viewers that were disappointed with the episode and they didn’t think that it was the best way to end the series. This may have made an impact Skins as from this they can see that they may have lost some interest from viewers and they may be encouraged to improve for the next series.

The whole idea of Facebook is changing the way we live, these days I don't think people have enough confidence to just go out somewhere and make a random friends and they would just get the small thrill of adding someone random on Facebook, who they will hardly talk to you or lives on the other side of the world. There are a large number of reasons to why this may be, to whether they just have low confidence, to whether they just have strict parents. It may just be the expectations of our elders, as I was asked by my uncle the other day as to why I was sat on Facebook on a Friday night rather than going out to get 'smashed' with my friends. When they were younger they didn't have the technology that we have today or the opportunities. There spare time was spent hanging

3 http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/2864021/Facebook-party-house-trashed.html

out with their friends, a common place to hang out was down by the railway line, when my mother was my age. They would take advantage of the local pubs that would let teens hang out in the back to play pool. Sitting in each evening wasn’t really an option for them, as they didn’t have the right technology that would keep them occupied.

Today we have a lot more opportunities that don’t involve the new technology but we choose to enjoy the latest ‘gadget’. As being a student, you don’t have many financial responsibilities, paying bills or anything like that. We have more time to spare and more money than the average adult who works full time, five days a week. This gives us a large amount of opportunities to enjoy being a young adult but as you observe Facebook, you still find a large majority of young adults spending their evenings online.

The whole idea that if you have internet access you can be on Facebook whenever you want has become a profit to phone companies. Most phones now have the internet available on them, apps are also available to use and they made a very popular app for Facebook. This now means that anyone with the right technology and with the right app, can now go online wherever and whenever they want. This then brings out the unlucky few who have the 'addiction' to Facebook, who then spend most of their time with their iPhone out, updating their status on Facebook. Itʼs now very easy for people to get addicted to the internet and its sites available and now we have other ways to get to it, rather than a computer, we now spend the majority of our day glued to these sites. Ruth Bloomfield produced an article on the Mail Online4 website which looked into this ‘addiction’ and how it may be ‘taking over our lives’. One line read ‘The UK has undoubtedly become a nation of Facebook addicts, ‘said a spokesman for market research company Mintel, which commissioned the report.’ This seems to be a common thought amongst people writing articles and it shows that it is an issue that is becoming more dominant in the online age. Another line in this article reads; ‘More than half of adults who use sites including Facebook, Bebo and YouTube admit they spend more time online than with real friends and family.’ This shows you that even though it may be an issue that is hidden under most peoples tongues, when Facebook users are asked they do agree that these sites have become an addiction to the regular users.

Facebook has effected a large amount of online users and I think that it has effected the way in which we socialise, whether it being good or bad. The case of it becoming an addiction has been raised across may articles and interviews but this may just be a word that we are using to explain the new way in which we socialise. Additions are normally said to be bad things that we can’t seem to lose and in some cases Facebook has brought about bad elements which make us question whether it is the best site to use. Facebook has allowed us to become friends with people from all parts of world and reunite with old friends. It has allowed us to daily state what we are doing and to make global events for anyone to attend. Even though each of these points can get out of control, for example the house party that went wrong, this seems to be the way in which our technology is evolving and how we are possibly trying to make the online world better.

4 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1176442/How-Facebook-changed-nation-introverts-taking- lives.html

Feedback From Nick and Students

Nick's feedback on my article so far;

- Why is it the most popular social networking site?

- Show both sides to my argument

-'Farmville' - who made this? how do they earn money from it?

- Expand on the Strawberry Fair event

- Why do you think the media latches on to stories like the house party that went wrong?

- What did they do before technology when at home?

- More reference to arguments - for and against Facebook

- More statistical evidence

Feedback from students on my article so far;

- Explain the coin system further on 'Farmville'

- Expand on why people may not have joined my event that I made

- Publishing dates or articles I have researched are not necessary

There were also a few grammar mistakes that they wanted me to correct.

This feedback was very useful to me as I was quite stuck on how to make my article more fuller and more interesting for the reader. Now that I know a lot of things I need to add, I can get on with expanding my article and giving the students an article which will be easier for them to revise from.

Research into Article Style Layout

Now that we are looking into the style of our articles, I thought that it would be a good idea to do some research before I start to think about what our newspaper should look like. I know that the product I have researched is a magazine but I feel that our newspaper will have more of a magazine feel to it, especially as it is aimed at students. I decided to look through my magazines at home, find the main article feature within the mag and annotating it on what they have used for their layout. Below are the images of the magazine that I took and also the post-it's that I put on the magazine to annotate it.

25th March - Sessions Work

Now that we have almost finished our articles, we need to really be thinking about how we want the article to layout and what it should look like within the newspaper. Myself and Alie have drawn out a small outline to what we thought the simple style layout should be and we used James' article as a basis for the layout and our outcome is the first image that you see below. The second image shows a print out of a document that we produced, which also displays a layout for the articles. We took the layout that we had drawn out, used boxes and lines in Pages to show the layout and then added in the appropriate text in the fonts and sizes that we thought would fit best.
This task was very useful as it gave use a basis for what we wanted the style to look like and we gathered them with others in the class and were able to see what we all wanted. It also showed us that we need to be more creative with these layouts, as we are paying for colour in the newspaper, we need to show how that would work and make the layouts more colourful and interesting.