Newspaper Synopsis

I have decided about the values I want my newspaper to be based around. It is important to set these out instead of just designing a newspaper then writing articles with no direction or principals.

My newspaper will report in a broadsheet manner, with political stories which will interest the majority of people. The language I will use will need to be more middle-market as to not alienate certain people, including youths. This includes the use of puns and some sensationalised language, which fits my writing style, however I will be careful not to fall into the realms of the Daily Mail's lexical features, which is far more tabloid than I will be hoping to achieve.

My newspaper will be first published on a weekly basis, meeting the conventions of local newspapers. I will not be a daily paper because on a local scale, there is not always enough content to fill a newspaper with from day to day, so I would have more to write about each week.

From a political perspective; like the 'i' and its sister paper the Independent, I aim to be free from political bias, because unlike on a national scale it is difficult to change and adapt to the political views from people on the local scene. With people power, money and a heck of a lot of experience, The Sun amongst others does this by fully supporting the Labour Party and criticising the Tory government at every opportunity. I will merely be giving an 'insight' into the news, hoping to comment on it in unprecedented detail, but not making suggestion readers should follow any political party.

In terms of size, my newspaper will be a compact/tabloid size, as mentioned in a previous post. I will do this to encourage people that there is not extensive amounts of texts to read through; something popular among younger audiences, as shown by the rise in sales of the Independent and Times as they have switched to the smaller format.

In terms of the content of my newspaper, as it is a local newspaper I will need to report on local stories. Despite this, I want to keep my readers up to date with what's going on in the country, and giving those stories a local perspective. In this way, with families struggling to make ends meet, they will need only one regular newspaper where all the information they need is in one place. I want to be one of the only newspapers around that combines local and national news in this way.

To meet a significant target audience for me, I will incorporate Facebook and Twitter to make the reader feel a part of the newspaper, which links in with the Uses and Gratifications theory by Blumler and Katz in a previous post. If readers feel a part of my newspaper, they will feel more obliged to read it, giving them the  impression they are influencing the content of my paper, as well as hoping their comments are published. Also in keeping with my target audience and from looking at conventions, I will emulate the 'news in brief' section that takes up the first inside pages of the 'i' newspaper in a smaller way. Being a proven way of delivering news in bite sized chunks, I will be hoping to give this service to my paper's own followers.

These values will run across all three of my products to avoid continuity errors and upsetting audiences. They will ultimately evolve over time, but for a one-off project, longevity is not necessarily something I am worried about.