Survey (Market research)

I need to find some stories locally and to do this I needed to find out just what young people; a primary target audience to me, wanted to see and read within the paper. I conducted a survey on Survey Monkey, giving participants options as to what kind of stories they would like to see and read within my newspaper. Because I wanted to give my newspaper a young target audience, I gave the survey to the young people from my class, whose ages range from 17-18, an age I would be happy to target at.

There was no gender or age bias in my survey, as half the participants were male and half were female.

 

Similarly, all participants voted as being 15-24, an important age range for advertising media texts to, because they are ultimately the future of journalism. As I have mentioned, because the ages were the same, I can infer that young people in general want to see the stories that were voted for.

As we can see, a surprising amount of people have voted for political stories to go into my newspaper, with four out of 10 people declaring an interest. Naturally, I will include political stories into my newspaper, as things like the budget cuts, new laws etc affect us all.
Somewhat more surprisingly is that nobody voted for sports stories to go into my newspaper. This could work to my advantage, because having small sports stories within the first three pages of a newspaper is unconventional, thus going against the conventions of real media texts and potentially upsetting an audience.

Conversely, technology was the most popular choice by my peers, which I could have guessed beforehand given the amount of technology and technology change we have grown up with throughout the '90s and the '00s. Secondly, one would expect a media class who are engaging in new media appliances and texts every week to want to read about new technologies; perhaps more so than, say a history class, so I need to be careful when generalising my sample to all young people. Despite this, I will include technology stories and integrate my newspaper with popular websites such as Facebook and Twitter to engage with a younger target audience.
Another expected front-runner is music news stories. Music is a big part of everybody's lives, again especially for a creative media class. I am hoping to write up about local bands within my allocated three pages.

Other popular choices were food stories, which could be tricky to add in on a local scale, and weather stories, which we know to be essential to all news outlets, especially given the British and indeed Cornish obsession with the weather!

It was interesting that local celebrities was only selected by 10% of people, as I made the decision to abandon a tabloid style for my newspaper and instead go with a traditional broadsheet style of reporting. This survey, along with my previous one from the beginning shows me that either young people are caring less and less about celebrities, or there are no Cornish celebrities to talk about that they are interested in.

I have learnt a great deal from this survey; and now have a better idea of what to put into my newspaper and what to leave out. At the end of the day, if people are not wanting to read excessive amounts of sport (albeit if it was at the back of the newspaper which I am not actually producing), or science stories, then the consumer is right and focusing on those stories would be a risk, especially if this is the launch of a new newspaper. Similarly, popular stories like technology stories and music need to be included in detail, as that seems to be where there is a lot of interest.