Ideas for articles

As mentioned previously I intend to integrate both national and international news with local news. This is already done in some regional newspapers, but in locals is fairly rare. I have got seven prospective stories lined up for the first and second pages of the newspaper I am going to produce, here they are;

Is Britain harboring the most terrorists in the Western world?

What are the Island M.P.'s stance on the coming national election?

Millionaire buyout of Shanklin theatre as it goes up for auction.

Sailors on Yacht stranded.

Isle of Wight Festival report, rumours etc.

Walk the Wight report.

Ferry break down.

Software

I have decided to opt out of using any of the office programs to carry out my final piece as I do not feel they will give the perfect design as they are predominantly used for word processing rather than design. I will probably use word to produce the articles then will transfer the articles over to the software I am going to use which is 'In Design CS4', here is an example which shows why this software will be better than publisher.

Layout

Local newspapers and national newspapers alike have a similar layouts as far as the banner and the title goes. However as I have mentioned in my previous post in most local newspapers there are advertisements in the corners either side of the title which are there in order to raise funds for the newspaper I feel I will have to conform with this use of advertisement as it would be crucial for the newspapers survival if I were to actually produce it. This point is backed up by the photographs I have posted of some of the local newspapers from across the country. Another ploy for sales of local newspapers which is also common in the national newspapers but predominantly at weekends is to add prize draws, competitions, free gifts and information on inserts in order to entice the prospective buyer into purchasing the paper.

Structure

Similar to most local newspapers I am going to place advertisements in all four corners of the front cover so as not to take away the readers attention too much from the articles. I am also going to use a tabloid sized page because their will not be enough news to fill a broadsheet, however I may go for a size in between the two similar to The Guardian and The Times because unlike other local newspapers I will be including some national news.

Newspaper 3

In order to add appeal to my newspaper as well as giving local news weekly I will also provide a summary of the weeks national and international news if anything major has happened and I will attempt to relate this as to how it will effect local residents for example if I were to publish a newspaper for a city that is very industrial then I would view the recession very negatively because it would detract from employment in that particular city. In order to grab the reader's attention I will not only use local news for the main headline, depending on the how important the biggest national news story is I will choose between them.

Newspaper 2

The structure and layout of this front cover is similar to national newspapers, probably because it is the newspaper for the capital of England. It differs from local newspapers because it is evident that local newspapers will need to use advertising as there main form of revenue as they cannot rely on huge amounts of people buying a local paper, this is why local papers will often be more expensive than national tabloids like the Sun. You may ask, however why the leading newspapers such as the telegraph and the Times are more expensive than local newspapers and that is because they give more groundbreaking news on a daily basis than a local newspaper can give weekly. Also tabloids rely heavily on journalists going out and gaining stories on celebrities and gossip so they can afford to charge less for their newspapers whereas national newspapers have to pay companies that sell news to newspapers then journalists have to write articles on this news, and local newspapers such as my local newspaper 'Isle of Wight County Press' will even occasionally publish articles that have been sent in by people are not professional. It's all relative however national newspapers are going to have more money to spend to begin with and they are writing about national news so they are going to have more exciting stories and therefore are going to have a better turnover.

Layouts

Here are some mock layouts that I believe stick to the codes and conventions of how newspapers should be set out.