Evaluation

Evaluation:

In AsMedia we were given the instructions to write an article about the changing face of our music industry, music piracy and file sharing as a way to help develop our journalism as a whole. With the help of our recent knowledge on InDesign to produce a template for our written pieces. I will be trying to attempt to discuss all the procedures I've been through whilst creating my magazine and with the help of my journalism and InDesign techniques.

In order to create my own article one of the key factors was research: factual evidence, opinions, statistics and quotes from various artists to help back my thoughts and ideas on the topic and helped make guidelines about what my article is going to be about. However I decided not to mention any celebrities or artists as I didn't think it applied to the audience I was targeting so I had to exclude it. As a result I used spotifyartists.com and whatculture.com which weren't reliable resources as the articles weren't recently written but the spotify website did have statistics that I didn't use which unfortunately made my article come across as unreliable. Subsequently I tried to use my knowledge with the help of the lessons in class and the debate session that I was apart of to ensure that I had arguments for and against to include in my article. I personally feel that I should've aimed the piece on an audience that is most likely I read a piracy article as they are able to relate to it and it would've had some relevance to them. 

In my written piece I chose to target a sophisticated audience and I tried to stick to 3rd person to make sure that my arguments didn't come across as biased on one specific individual. Ensuring that I have argued for both sides equally and it also allows the audience to make assumptions according to what thy have read. I tried to restrict my target audience by aiming it specifically for Uk citizens that are slightly older and perhaps aren't as aware about the music industry. In order to do so I was trying to receive the information about piracy in the same perspective as the audience by placing myself In their position. The tone of my voice is perhaps hard to analyse as I was using a variety to make sure that I wasn't pressurising the audience to feel a certain way and If I did intend to do so it's an extent and it was mainly used to make the readers feel as if they were a part of the article; examples of this are the use of rhetorical questions. Overall I think I changed the format of my writing from a newspaper article to an essay as I wasn't aware of how to maintain a newspaper structure and I was in a habit if writing in an essay style layout due to English assignments. Which is why one of the things I need to improve in is learning on how to write according to the the type of text structure.

We used InDesign as a template for our magazine article to make it as identical to an actual magazine. Also with the help of InDesign I learnt various techniques to apply to my work such as: making columns and text boxes by using tools in InDesign, selecting objects such as images with the selection too, changing the size of the text to make it eye catching and bold so it's visible and clear for the readers. I'd also learnt how to export my work info a JPEG, add headers, captions, drop caps and colour to the text. Overall I found that InDesign was quite difficult and I struggled in presenting it in a suitable format for my work on my own but with the help of a peer I was able to apply some of the techniques.

Finally we had to blog our articles and I didn't like the sound of this as I haven't had any experience to this but blogging wasn't as a hard as I thought and I enjoyed blogging my first task as it's an easy process and time sufficient. Not only is it a good way to utilise your time but it doesn't have to be targeted at a specific audience as it's accessible to audiences globally. I didn't have much to write about my first blog as I didn't know what to write but I feel that I'll be able to write detailed posts within time and lots of practice.

The audience feedback was very constructive and it helped me reflect on the mistakes I made which were to focus on the layout of my work; columns (sizes) as they didn't differentiate whether my piece was a magazine or a newspaper article and I will take the criticism into consideration by making amendments using InDesign and focusing on how magazines structure their articles.

With the help of the Criticism I'm also able to help myself set targets according to it. 

Firstly, to use other journalism pieces as a guide/ template for my actual piece as it will help me have a wider grasp on what I should include in my own piece. 

Secondly, to work on my presentational skills to make sure I've kept it eye catching for the audience.

To add on to that I should've used images to make my work eye pleasing for the readers and encourage them to read more.

Lastly, my target audience wasn't clear enough as my article had a variety of language tones and perhaps the wording wasn't used correctly and I need to focus on using appropriate language to change that.