Digital News Production: Ideas For Group Project

For this new Unit I have been assigned to come up with ideas for a Digital News film as part of a new group project. For this I am working with Aaron Perks, Kate Sergeant and Sam Babington. We were given a brief into Digital News as well as being given examples including a showing of a BBC News report to see how we can structure it together. We analysed the film and everything we knew about reporting to think of ways to make an interactive website based on delivering the news. How did we go about this?

Target Audience: 

The first thing we decided once we got into our group was that we wanted to target a younger audience, instinctively we knew that those aged 16-24 will be the most savvy when it comes to reading news online. It made sense to us that since those in that age group are students that have left school and are moving up into higher education we should focus on that audience. We are aware that this also makes our website more of a niche but it will give us a larger foothold in securing that younger audience versus a broader general news program.
There are several categories we have chosen to focus on for our group project:

Brand Identity: 

(Logo)- black background, white headline. There could also be sub-headings included such as purple, green and blue for the different categories of news topics.

Categories:

Entertainment: This category is possibly the most crucial, especially for our target audience since younger people are primarily interested in the world of entertainment (i.e Film, TV, Music etc.)
We could also find a way of linking it towards them via stories based around students and anything they can relate to such as popular clubs or typical student tropes.

Art & Culture: This category is meant to be informative as well as educational, it also broadens the base of our target audience.

Celebrities: Undoubtably the easiest way to gain a younger audience is to base a category around showbiz culture. Particularly in this topic which is rife which controversy, debate and plenty of gossip. The unique part will be putting our own spin on it to make it different than other celebrity driven web based material.

Gadgets: This is quite unique to our channel as most news driven channels tend to skip over this sort of informative discussion. The truth is that more and more student based demographics are heavily into finding out about upcoming technology. We could make it very interactive for our audience and focus on different topics such as the new iPhone 6 and the controversy surrounding it. (See below.)

We do want to reach as large a possible audience in our demographic so we will focus on an unspecified category to cover other major news stories (i.e Politics, War) that won't fit into the above categories. This will most likely be expanded on in the weeks to come.

One of the most important things to remember though is that although the website is entertainment based and it is aimed at the student demographic its important not to insult the audience. This means we shouldn't patronise them and shouldn't base it so heavily specifically on students. This could lead to alienating some older viewers as a result.

What category am I working on?

For this group project I will be focusing on the Gadgets category.

Source Examples To Use: 

Apple's competitors made fun
 of their recent controversy.

Social Media (Facebook, Twitter etc.
TV/Film
Newspapers/Magazines/Articles


An example of a popular story centred around this category would be the controversy over Apple's newly released iPhone 6. News has spread across social media that they have received some complaints that their new phone bends easily. This has caused many to be put off or start panicking although Apple tries to assure people in a statement that very few complaints have been received in the last week.

I found the original article based on this story on The Guardian's website.
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/sep/25/apple-response-bend-iphone6-6p-plus-nine-complaints