Statement of Intent
I intend to produce a front page of a newspaper with an audience are people of all ages living in the region who are interested in national and international news stories as well as stories relating specifically to the local area. My newspaper will be named “The Jersey Topic” and will comment on popular culture on the island of Jersey as well as hard news to do with politics, healthcare, and business etc. I imagine that this newspaper will present a relatively libertarian left wing political compass due to its heavy focus on humanity, culture and freedom over economics, business and politics. This links to Habermas’s ideas on the public sphere and how newspaper paved a way for creating a libertarian “arena of public debate” in which people had the freedom to express and discuss real world issues. I intend for this newspaper to “reflect a wide range of opinions and interests” (James Curran)
The main story featured on the front cover will be how the Jersey Opera House has been closed since the beginning of 2020. In the report I will focus on how the government has neglected the historical building due to a disregard towards the cultural industries. I will use previous news reports on the issue to help influence my own.
The headline for the front-page article will be “History left to ruin”. To accompany this, I will include two images of the building which highlight its abandonment as well as a subtitle which reads; “Abandoned culture neglected by lack of governmental support.” Following this will be a byline which reads: ‘By Charlie Dicker.’ As for layout and positioning, I will base my product on my style model, The Daily Mail newspaper (CSP) although I intend to include more copy/ ‘body’ text. The images I plan to include will be a long shot main image of the theatre building and then a close-up shot of the theatre logo, the caption on these photos will read; “Jersey Opera House, one of the islands most historical buildings, has been abandoned by the states”. To create my production, I intend to use a combination of ‘Adobe Photoshop’, ‘Microsoft Word’ (to write my copy) and ‘Adobe InDesign’. This will allow me to create the singular aspects to then compile it all together in one production piece. To create a realistic, professional newspaper design, I will include a series of ‘ears’ which link to other pages of the paper as well as a masthead, a barcode and columns for my body text.
I will structure the article using the ‘inverted pyramid of journalism’ model which explores how audiences read and decode news articles. Firstly, I will include factual, newsworthy, interesting information e.g. ‘Who, what, where, how, when’ which gives the basic background. This should be featured first to engage the passive audience with facts and figures which they can be ‘fed’. Secondly, I will appeal to the active audience who will read further, through continuing with more detailed accounts by using quotes from secondary sources before rounding the article off to a conclusion.
Having studied audience theories as well as theories on cultural institution, I will focus on the theory of Uses and Gratifications by Katz to link to the gratifications of consuming culture, in particular the theatre, as well as taking influence from David Hesmondhalgh’s theories on the creative industries and how creativity is a “risky business” which must be supported by certain strategies to reduce this risk.
