Focus Group

When doing my focus groups, I decided to use both newspapers I used for my deconstructions. I did this because I had seen the paper myself and made my own opinion about it, but however i needed to and wanted to see what others of different genders, ages and origins of people thought about both of the local newspapers. The group i had looking at the deconstructions were a group of 15 people. Eight people were between the ages of 12-18, 2 people were between 23-28. Three people were between 30-37 years old. One was 43 and the other was 49. There were 7 women and 8 men in the group, from different origins and ethnicities.

The first newspaper i showed to the focus group was the Get Reading newspaper. The comments made about the newspaper was that the corporate banner worked well as it advertised and helped gain reputation for local businesses and organizations; whilst being a traditional code and convention, the main headline wasn't associated with the main picture in the paper. This works well as it then gets the reader reading two stories and not just the obvious main headline story.

Having carried out a focus group to decide what to include in my local newspaper, i produced my first version of the front page and asked the same groups opinion on it.

They said that it was too simplistic to be a real newspaper and that the layout was more like a 'fanzine' than a local newspaper. The main story was a good choice but there were simple errors which didn't allow the newspaper to be a realistic and believable paper to be sold.

This focus group taught me that more thought needed to go into my design and i needed to go back to the drawing board on this one. I learned that i need corporate items on the front page like adverts and a barcode in order to convince the public that this is a real local newspaper and that it is like and can be compared to the local newspapers sold in the shops today. It showed me that there is more to a newspaper than just you think, i thought doing a newspaper would be easy but it wasn't. It is hard stuff, if your ideas get put down then it does affect you but for me it affected me in the right way, it made me want to finish the task even better than i had hoped in the first place.Here is an image of my original front page which was real to the designs i drew and also what my final front page looked like.

Original Design

Final Front Page