Tuesday, 25 September 2012

Evaluation On File Sharing Article

 Here is my evaluation on my file sharing article;

Is the music industry fighting a losing battle? (Evaluation)

Research Skills
The research part of the process was both hard and easy.  When it came to paraphrasing that was quite difficult as when I found some paragraphs or important bits of information I would think that they were already well written so that I’d find it hard to rephrase certain things. I had used The Bbc, Guardian and BPI websites the most as I found that they had the most necessary information and they are also reliable sites. What I found challenging was find worthy material that was both relevant to the topic of the article and was recent to 2012 because the facts and figures needed to be recent or they could be inaccurate and not make any sense. I didn’t really use much information from the newsbeat article in mine however as a group we did discuss some of the points and I mentioned a few points. The independent online research was good because it enabled me to use my own initiative and find what information I thought needed to be in the article.
Sources used – Newsbeat article, Bbc website, Guardian website, Bpi website and friends.

Journalistic and writing skills
My magazine article was aimed at 16-19year olds. The colours I had chosen were neutral gender colours so not to focus on just females or just males. I had used a low lexis, as it was for younger people however I refrained from using any slang terms because I felt that this was best way to present the article, as it’s a formal format. I structured the article into paragraphs, the starting paragraph being the introduction to the topic of file sharing and the last being my opinion on file sharing. I had not used any rhetorical questions. I had used quotations, one from 50 cent, another from people I know and also some quotes from the music industry. On one of the quotes said I gave my opinion on whether I agreed with that quote or not.

InDesign
Having few existing skills from using Photoshop and publisher I was not prepared at all. Once I had been shown the InDesign layout I was completely lost although the layout is very similar to Photoshop and the process is also quite similar to that of Publisher. In my article, I had used a number of columns all of equal sizes so I had to use the ruler, I had shown a mark where the page would split to make two sides as an article in a magazine would look like, once I had added the photos needed I placed pull quotes on them, with the headline I made it mainly black but a couple of letters I had done in red to catch the readers attention, the images placement took a lot of thought but in the end I had finally found the right positioning, one on each side of the page. One weakness would be getting a big enough size picture to fit into my image box however I know that this was because we had to get images off of the internet but in the future we’ll be taking our own photographs so they’ll be up to scale, another weakness would be that I spent too long on designing the actual layout than I did putting the text in. My strength would be the whole process of designing layouts; I find it brings out my creativeness.

Web publishing skills
The web publishing side of it worked out fine, however I did have some issues when it came to firewall problems, these had stopped me from having access to certain websites which means that I could’ve missed out on important information that could’ve made my article better. When it came to setting up my blog that part was quite easy. I then uploaded my article onto my blog, which was a quick process and I will then share it to my classmates on blogger so that they can give me some online feedback.

Audience Feedback
I had asked four of my classmates to give me feedback on my article, I asked for both good and bad aspects so I could then make notes on improvements that I could use in future media assignments. These were the responses that I had received:
1.     Zeinab – The positive aspects were that she liked the title as it fits in with the theme also she liked how the picture on the left hand side of the article is colourful and stands out on the page. The negative aspects were that there was too much text, the writing was too small and I could’ve made the quote bigger.
2.     Conrad- the good aspects were that he liked the use of red, white and black as a colour scheme; he liked the image of 50 cent because of the contrast between the black and white and the colourful image on the other side. The bad aspects were that there is too much white space also there is no page numbers.
3.     Sadiyya – She said that she likes that there are two images so that it’s not focused on one person and she liked how I had highlighted some points/keywords in red, to improve the article I could add more colour.
4.     Kashif- he said that he liked the colour scheme and the layout but the font is too small and when the page is folded part of the title will not be visible.


4 targets for improveme
1. Have a colour background it looks a bit plain (too much white space)
2. Include some rhetorical questions to get the audience thinking and questioning
3. Include more facts
4. Have less text and more detailed points

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