Evaluation

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

After much research of many media institutions and the radio shows they play, I have concluded that a local light-hearted radio station such as BBC Oxford or Jack FM would distribute our radio show. It is common for local stations to broadcast local dialects (and we are all native to Oxfordshire) This became apparent during my research into 95.6 Bolton FM. And we mix local and national stories, such as our coverage of the local mans crocodile farm contrasted with our coverage of Haiti.

http://www.jackfm.co.uk/

This link to Jack FM will allow you to listen to the similarities of our broadcast and theirs. These local stations build better relationships with their listeners as they present to a smaller number of people who get more input via phone-ins and competitions.

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 who I assume will be local to Oxfordshire. We represent young Oxfordians by being them ourselves. A lot of our stories, such as the John Terry affair are light hearted and relevant to popular culture. This is entwined with serious stories that interest and challenge our audience’s views. 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 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.

How did you attract/address your audience?

If our radio segment was a daily show, we would attract our audience through local mediated advertisement. There is no point spending millions of pounds on national advertisement for a local radio show, so I would focus on Poster and possible local TV/Radio Adverts in the Oxfordshire area.
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 Eastender and feeling an 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 in. 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.

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. 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 as well as other instruments such as the microphones, handheld voice recorders and even video cameras 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?

I and my 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 mike we were too loud and didn’t do enough to stop disturbances. 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 ‘buzzing’ effect in our Haiti voxpop. Our presenting skills are also much improved, with our voice tones suited to a News environment.
As a group our time management excelled from our preliminary, as we 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.