For my A level coursework I will be choosing brief 2, which contains a newspaper front cover and double page spread along with three flyers promoting said newspaper. I will base my newspaper on riots occurring in the Royal Square in Jersey due to the recent surge in price of fuel, as a result of the recent war in Ukraine. The broad nature of this real world issue will make it easier for a larger audience who will be affected to relate to the newspaper, and in turn this will link to the idea that the audience are actively consuming the product, as Paul Lazarfelt depicted.
My NEA will have additional theoretical underpinning, relating to the theories of semiotics. The dominant signifier in my paper (main image) will be a fuel meter which will be itself very reactionary, as it shows the recently increasing price which many of the audience will relate to. In addition, the anchorage will be written and described from a customer viewpoint with negative vocabulary towards the recent price increase, in order to try and intertwine with the dominant ideology of the target audience that the prices of fuel should not be this high. Furthermore, on the double page spread I will elaborate on the timeline of fuel prices and why they have increased as of late, which will allow me to use Todorov’s theory of a beginning, middle and end. I will also be able to use business/institutional vocabulary here.
I will be following a style model of one of our main CSPs, the Daily Mail. In this CSP the page has a main image taking up around half of the page. It will all be underneath a masthead for the paper, and it will also include other standard institutional features such as a price, barcode, and date/time. I will design my key elements in Photoshop. I will write my body copy on the blog and use InDesign to create the other elements and to put it all together.
As well as my front cover/double page spread of my newspaper, I will also be creating three promotional flyers around the issue with fuel prices. My three flyers will be around different aspects of the campaign, with one being about how people should switch to electric cars to help the environment, urging impressionable people such as teenagers to try and reduce emissions this flyer will have two original images, being an electric car charging station and a petrol pump. In addition, my second flyer will be around the idea of students at 6th forms giving lifts to others, to save petrol with the massively increasing prices at the moment. This flyer will have original images, such as stick men asking for lifts with language similar to that of an average sixth from student in order to help my target audience resonate with the product, and a picture of current fuel prices in Jersey at St. Ouen’s Motor Works which my audience will be familiar with and relate to. My final flyer will be about how you can save money by not even buying pricey petrol, and using other forms of transport instead to not only protect the environment, but also undertake physical exercise. The original images used here will be cartoon versions of a car and bike, which I will put together in illustrator and a cross and tick mark overlaid on them, made in photoshop. My flyers will have a coordinated hashtag at the bottom – #GoGreen to try and encourage interactivity and the sharing of information via social media, and I will use similar fonts, colours and layout/spacing to keep my unique flyers recognisable as a unified campaign.
