Daily Mail cover evaluation

1) What was the task you were given and who was your target audience?

The task we were given was to create a front page for a daily mail newspaper based on Harry and Meghan's split due to her being in an affair as revealed by her friend Miss Indiana Savannah. The target audience was demographic c2, d and e and an older age group due to the fact it was a front page for the print newspaper.

2) What research did you undertake and what did you find were some of the typical conventions of a Daily Mail front cover - layout, types of stories, fonts

I researched information about Harry and Meghan's relationship to get some background info and also researched images of recent daily mail front pages. I found that typically daily mail only use big bold headlines and no images for their main headlines and then include an advert as a banner along the top and another story along the side of the main headline, which has a small article beneath summarizing the story.

3) Which Daily Mail cover did you use as your main source? Insert. What are your observations from this source?

My observations from this source is that the offer on the advert is almost the same size as the main headline text which draws the reader in as well as the headline which is always exaggerated to generate shock value, then the side headline uses a dark background to contrast the main headline to make it stand out. The front page also uses bullet points above the main headline to summarize the story in a basic way for the reader to easily understand when passing by.

4) Which areas did you find most challenging?

I found making the headlines the most challenging as I had to find a similar font and get the text to the right size and reduce the space between the characters and paragraphing lines. Another challenging area was resizing the images to not appear stretched out and also match the overall layout of a typical daily mail front page.

5) What was you initial feedback? What did others say about your production? How successful was do you think it is?

I think my attempt was fairly successful and others thought that my cover was pretty similar to the cover I had based it upon, however the font style I had used compared to the daily mail's is slightly noticeably different and I used different adverts to match the overall theme of the main headline I was using, which therefore changed the colour scheme of my front page compared to the original.

6) Identify what went well and with hindsight what you do to improve/do differently.

I think creating and wording my headlines and articles went well as I did the appropriate research, however I would improve the front that I used and try to reduce the amount of white space on my front page as it is noticeably different compared to the original paper.

7) In the exam you will be analysing newspaper front covers. In producing this cover, are there any areas that you hadn't noticed before? What have you learn't from completing this task?

I hadn't noticed at the bottom of articles and adverts that there were phrases like 'see page five' which redirect you to another page to read the full story, as the daily mail cleverly selects dramatic snippets from the articles to put on front covers to draw the reader in, as well as carefully tailoring their adverts to match the headline on the newspaper and therefore I tried to do this on my front page.