Research
The main purpose of a newspaper ad is to give a generic overview of the topic, in this case our documentary, in order to offer and insight and encourage the reader to watch it. Newspaper ads are widely accessible to almost everyone, especially now mot newspapers offer an online website or application.
We had chosen to do the newspaper advertisement instead of the magazine spread as we thought our audience of more intellectual status would be more likely to be reading a newspaper than a magazine. However, before we started planning our own newspaper ad we researched into different codes and conventions to help ours look as realistic as possible.
We noticed that ad's for TV programs, such as our documentary, could come in two sizes. Programs like 'Game of Thrones' had a double page spread written about it, and 'Rheingold' only had a small section of the page around it. We decided as a pair, that it would be more beneficial to us to create a double page spread on our documentary, as this would give us the opportunity to showcase many different forms and conventions.
Conventions
- Perhaps the first thing you see on an article is a headline. They are almost always in a large, bold font and usually take up the whole page. This draws the readers attention to an article because they can see straight away what the article is going to be about.
- The main image about the article is likely to be very big as well, to offer a visual insight into what the article is about. There may be smaller images around, which relate to certain parts of the piece.
- In some articles, a quote will be blown up and almost used as an image to illustrate the points that the article is making. The quote used is normally in the main article as well.
- The main convention of a newspaper is that the writing is in columns. Without applying this to ours, the newspaper ad won't have a sense of realism and is less likely to achieve what we want.
- A commonly used convention of a newspaper is that the first few words or phrase of the first paragraph is put in bold/italics and then the sentence will be written as usual.
Planning: The Layout
For our newspaper advertisement, we decided to create a double page spread, in order to showcase the forms and conventions we had researched. As our documentary focused mainly around the issues surrounding 'Brexit', but also an insight into the US presidential election, we knew it was important that the images we chose to use, didn't focus on one and not the other.
We decided to have the two images (one per page) behind the text, so we could take full advantage of the space, to write up the article.
On the left hand side of the article, we used this image of Big Ben:
We knew that this image connotes London, the capital, and therefore gives readers an immediate insight into the topic of the article and our documentary.
On the right hand side, we wrote about the US election side of our documentary, so we knew the image we used had to represent America. We decided to go for a photo of President Trump as this is very relevant in the media right now.
We used the image above, in portrait, to represent the second half of the article. We agreed that his name, placed at the bottom in the centre, looked really eye catching, the image speaks for itself on the topic.
Through our research, we knew and understood what kind of information we needed, along with the forms and conventions we needed to include in our newspaper advertisement.
These include things like the overall tone of the documentary, the channel, time of viewing etc. We also knew that including direct quotes from the individuals we interviewed/ spoke about would be of a lot of importance, to engage readers into the kind of topics we were going to be covering, all whilst not giving too much information away.
Our Newspaper Advertisement:
Below is our finished newspaper advertisement.
