Conventions of Local Newspapers

I have been researching conventions of local newspapers, these are my findings:
- Bold headlines are used throughout, but especially on the front page
- Images are also included, with colour pictures featured on the front and an amalgamation of black and white and colour images inside the newspaper.
- The masthead includes the date, the price and the name of the newspaper, and sometimes their website address
- The front page also features a weather forecast for the week
- There are many different sections throughout, including sport, business, letters from readers regarding previous articles, local stories and local advertisments including local businesses promoting themselves, people advertising homes, cars and bikes for sale, and adverts for general items that people are selling.
- The first article on the front page tends to be of a high importance and interesting to encourage someone to buy the newspaper. Other interesting stories may be briefly mentioned on the front page also.
- The newspaper is made of a material called newsprint, which is thinner than regular paper and also cheaper.
- The more important the story, the more columns are devoted to it. Smaller stories are featured around the edges of larger ones.

Annotating newspapers

To show clearly how the larger newspapers like the Sun are different to local newspapers like The Halstead Gazette, I am planning to annotate the front pages of different newspapers and highlight similarities and differences between them. I will scan the newspapers onto my computer and annotate them using Microsoft publisher, then upload the finished annotated copies onto my blog. I am going to include the design, the colours that are used, the fonts that are used, the size of the pictures, what the pictures are of, how much writing is on the front, what the newspaper is mainly about, the price and other features.

Local newspapers

After researching popular newspapers I looked at some local newspapers such as the Halstead Gazette and the Sudbury Mercury to differentiate between smaller newspapers and larger more commercial ones. 

The Halstead Gazette included local news including upcoming events, local people's achievements and the local weather forecast. It also included adverts for local businesses and had a page where people were selling cars etc. 

The Sudbury Mercury is similar to the Halstead Gazette as it included similar local news stories. It also featured a Sport sub-heading which showed information regarding local sports teams, mainly football. There were also hyperlinks in different colours at the top for house sales, a dating section and other topics. 

Newspapers

I researched some online newspapers to highlight differences between them. 

The Times is a more formal newspaper, not using as many pictures as The Sun to illustrate their stories. The title of the newspaper is written in a serif font, implying that this newspaper writes about more important matters as oppose to celebrity headlines.

The Sun focuses more on celebrities and footballers. It uses brighter colours like red to catch the readers attention and more images, mainly of the celebrities. Humorous headlines are often used in The Sun, as the stories don't tend to be as serious; focusing more on mundane news such as who's sleeping with who.

Seeing the difference between these newspapers has helped give me ideas regarding the layout and design of my newspaper website.  

Decisions decisions

Honestly after not much thought, I concluded that I would attempt to successfully create the first two pages of a newspaper article for my A2 Media coursework. The other briefs didn't appeal to me as much, especially as in the future I hope to be a journalist, therefore this particular option is perfectly suited to my career choice. I am genuinely looking forward to this task; how enlightening it is that studying can actually be enjoyable and anticipated by someone such as myself. Only in Media Studies of course.