Evaluation Question 3 - John Selby

3. What have you learned from your audience feedback?
During the research phase of our project we researched audience behaviour, habits and interests and kept them in mind throughout all stages in our production. We used a GZ-MG 330 HDD Camcorder to record all our initial interviews held during the research stage. We interviewed a range of age groups during the research stage and looked at their viewing habits, preferred style of news, preferred stories and their opinions on improvements towards news programmes in general. Nearly all of our ideas stem from this initial research and it highly influenced our final product in terms of start times, formality, news coverage, costume, set, location and many other aspects.

(Example of initial audience research)
We found that many of our audience preferred to watch the news when they had spare time, usually around tea time. For example one interviewee, when asked what time they prefer to watch the news, replied "When I've got time, usually around 6ish" (6 O'Clock). These kind of answers directly influenced our decision to broadcast our news programme at our selected time. Also from this research we found that the younger generations preferred the news to be less formal, but not too informal. This was evident in some answers, when asked 'What formality of news they prefer', such as "When they're all sat down on sofas as it's more relaxed". We initially found this request rather tricky but ended up settling on using costumes that were simple yet formal such as smart shirts and suit trousers, using a lower more informal desk and including more trivial, sport and music stories. We believe this would fully cater to the audiences demand for less formal news without it been too informal.

Throughout all stages of our media production we kept the audience in mind and tried to the best of our abilities to fully provide them with a new style of news that appeals to a younger audience whilst also keeping them up-to-date with current international affairs. We chose to include a range of topics to cover in our stories which expressed the audiences interests in more local news with bands, music and sport event stories being the bulk of our news whilst also covering a major national or international story. We eventually decided to include a story about a local bands rise to fame and a the local college's rugby team's success whilst also including a story on how the recession is affecting the lives of the Barnsley public. We believe we achieved our initial aims and surpassed any targets arisen from our initial audience research. As well as this we tried to include a lot of visual stimulation for the audience, such as descriptive titles where we felt the audience needed informing, and including voice-overs where necessary to fully elaborate on visual information given and to appeal to auditory learners as well as visual.

Once we had made a rough edit of our news programme we trial ran it passed some peers who were of similar age to our target audience. We asked for criticisms, positive feedback and fresh ideas to enable us to tweak any imperfections for maximum enjoyment from our news programme for our intended audience. One issue raised in this trial run was a sense of confusion amongst our viewers over some certain areas in the production. One critic said "when some locations are shown such as the Lucorum, I think that there could be a bit of a description about what is shown, such as a title of the location or how it relates to the story". We then looked back at each problem and found realistic solutions and applied them to the most appropriate areas. This process included adding voice-overs where the visuals failed to fully inform the viewer, adding text on-screen to certain frames including new guests and locations and including more shots to break up long interviews which some viewers found to slow the pace of the programme. We also found from this that the cultural situation of the viewer was going to be a vital aspect in our news programme. It was planned to be local news and therefore local regional dialects are used by the presenters and reporters and many local locations were used and we assumed a local audience would be aware of these locations so no text prompts were given. This was another issue raised by our critics in the trial run and something which we overcome by adding titles to certain locations that our critics deemed confusing.