evaluation

What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?

I believe that our radio show would be best distributed on Jack FM or Heart FM as these are both localised radio stations that cover both local and national news stories which was present in our show. I believe that these kinds of radio stations rely heavily on delivering what the audience wants to hear which is what inspired us in our work as we wanted to deliver a piece that would create almost a community between us and the listeners much like Bolton FM has with its listeners.
This is important because it will keep the listener coming back from more and even subconsciously they will listen to our show through the Social Cognitive Theory (1941 miller and Dollard) which explains how the media can change the audiences behavioural patterns for example when driving in the car our audiences that have been affected by our shows will automatically and sometime even unknowingly tune there radio to listen to our show.

I also believe that these radio stations would want to distribute our media product because of the potential advertising increase, what i mean is that with any new show there comes several chances to market the product for example with a broadcast such as ours it applies to a range of differnt niches with the main focus on the younger adult groups this could potentially give rise to an increase in advertisers such as various phone companies and clothing companies as they coud see the value in advertising during our show as many of there target audience will be listening.

Who would be the audience for your media product? And how does it represent particular social groups?

Our target audience will be teenagers to young adults, 15 to 24. Most of which I assume will be local to Oxfordshire. We represent young Oxfordians by being them ourselves. this will be important as it creates a bond between us and our isteners as they will feel they can relate to us.
A lot of our stories, such as the John Terry affair are light hearted and relevant to popular culture, This story in particular represents people of all social groups and ages and will give us the opportunity to attracrt new audience through the Arguementation Theory which is best shown in the book 'principles of arguementation' (Pierce 1895) this theory states that our radio station would get more attention because of the people hearing our show will hve there own beliefs about this story and will argue with others and through this the news will spread through the area.
This story is followed by serious stories that interest and challenge our audience’s views such as our Haiti coverage.
Despite this, as a news segment we would hope to have a large variety of audience to address
due to most people wanting the news to keep up to date with the world. This is proven by ‘The news at Ten’ being one of the most viewed programs in history and that news has spread to more niche markets such as children with ‘News Round’ and music lovers with ‘Kerrang News’. The Cultivation Theory(Gerbner 1965) tells us how the media is such an important source of information that consumers find it ultimately impossible to escape it's gradual encroachment on their everyday lives- this again will increase our viewing figures as the radio is located in several areas of everyday live such as radio alarm clocks and stereos in the car this products gradually introduce the radio into our lives.

How did you attract/address your audience?

If our radio broadcast was a daily showthen we would attract our audience through local mediated advertisement. Since we would not be able to get the massive industrial comapnies involved we would look to the local buisness and sports teams following in the footsteps of Bolton FM so since we would be broadcasting in the oxfordshire area we could get oxford united football club to invest in return for advertising there games and creating phone ins with the prizes being tickets to football matches.
Our Jingle will also attract our audiences, It has been theorised that a person can become attracted to a jingle if they hear it enough time though the mediated Syringe Theory. An example of this would be an individual recognising the theme music to Eastenders or corination street since these are two of the most sunonamous jingles to date and when the audience hear these they feel the urge to go watch.
Our jingle would work in a similar way for our audience, if they are browsing through radio stations and get a blast of our jingle, they will stop and listen. This will fundamentally raise our profile.
Furthermore I would attract audience through advertising, especially through the Syringe Theory of playing our adverts locally over and over and the Two Step Flow Theory of allowing our media consumers to discuss our show amongst themselves and hopefully attract new consumers to tune in.
finally i woud use the increasing intrest of our target audience in social networks such as Facebook and Twitter to further raise our profile by making fan groups in which we can provide updates about what is happening, what listeners can expect to hear and chances for them to get involved in competions this will raise the shows ratings through the Social Network Theory in which in our case states that the more of an online presence we have in these networks then the more people will recieve our piece through both this theory and the Two Step Flow Theory.


What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

Through the construction of our radio piece we came into contact with many new technologies and media instruments. The key program we used was the computer program ‘Audacity’. Created by Dominic Mazzoni, this simple yet effective program recorded our voices through microphones and then allowed us to edit. As i already posted earlier i reviewed this technology and looked at other peoples comments although i found some limitations with this technologies the positivies easily made this the best editing choice software. The editing process consisted to cutting and lengthening voice segments and overlapping them with backing sounds such as quieter music or ‘buzzing and disjointed' effect used in our Haiti story to represent technical problems that would occur while broadcasting a piece of news from another country. Over the course of our project I have learnt to master Audacity. This was helped by before we started on our piece i looked into how to use audacity by viewing tutorial on www.youtube.com which made the editing process alot easier as i did not have to learn through trial and error however as well as audacity i learned to use other instruments such as the microphones and handheld voice recorders when filming an evaluation video.

Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

Me and the group have come a long way since our preliminary. In our preliminary we were still learning how to use programs such as Audacity and had technical difficulties in the editing phases. While speaking into the microphone we were too loud and didn’t do enough to stop disturbances or at differnt time we would be too quiet which would mean audacity could not pick up our voices properly. We looked to stop this in our radio broadcast through using a microphone stand which meant that we could keep the microphone in the same place which meant that it would not be a problem with use being either too close or too far away from the microphone.
I think as a learning curve the preliminary can still be seen as a success as it did teach us the basics and pushed us to achieve and do better for our final piece. Our final piece is much better flowing with many more technical skills such as an improved jingle, sound effects between headlines and our disrupting effect in our Haiti voxpop.
My presenting skills are also much improved, through watching various news shows to give myself an idea of what my voice shoud sound like for my speaking sections. My time management excelled from the preliminary, as we all met up frequently in own free time to record and edit. I think the progress we made can be put down to our excelled effort and understanding of preparation as we shared ideas, researched stories and scripted; our recording as we were more experienced and progressed through trial and error and finally our postproduction, spending a lot of time editing on Audacity to achieve our final piece.