Long time no see

22Feb08

First things first – apologies for the long delay in posting. The last couple of weeks have flown by with the Uni workload ever increasing (plus United dumped the Gunners out the FA Cup = high alcohol consumption = low productivity). While I’m over using the equals sign, I might as well warn you, long catch up = long post!

Firstly we are trying to crank out the next edition of the newspaper – Canvas. I’ve come to realise that editing the sports section and playing for the football first team are roles that simply cannot work together efficiently. Having to rely on members of the other sports teams in the Uni to provide some copy with which I can edit and work with is proving a fruitless way of gathering content. I try to report on a few games myself, but I can’t be everywhere at once! The deadline for the copy was today. Notice WAS, meaning I didn’t hit the deadline and still waiting for copy. No doubt I’ll be laying out the page myself next week anyway, so for now this is no big deal.

As discussed before, we are working on creating a sister website for the newspaper in my online unit. After looking in my last post into how others do it, you will be glad to know we are now well on our way to starting to create the site. The class looked at the actual paper, which although very good, is quite traditional in both design and content. We wanted a more student focus, which coincidentally is an approach we are trying to work towards for the second issue of the paper. Nevertheless, we split the paper into five larger sections which we thought would be more suitable for the web. With section heads allocated for ‘News/Sport’, ‘Your Union’, ‘Entertainment & Lifestyle’ (yes that is ONE section), ‘Events’ and ‘Showcase’ , I along with Nereasha have been tasked with the design of the site. A scoot around the web brought me to a site called modernlifeisrubbish, that has some good advice for effective web design. My lecturer pointed us there before I’m sure, and with some sound advice on how to keep things simple I can see why. With these points in mind, we have started laying out the homepage visually in Fireworks, so we can later create the site in Dreamweaver by tracing tables over the Fireworks file (a technique learnt in the Dreamweaver tutorials that Jim runs through with us). Seems simple – but it’s early days!

Alongside this, in Print we have begun work on our final assessment. Already you ask? Well this is because we have to effectively produce an original mini-magazine. With four men making up my group, we thought a men’s lifestyle mag would be the best option. We’re aiming to plug the gap between your lads mags – FHM, Maxim, Loaded etc.. and your more upmarket, aspirational mag – GQ, Arena, Esquire. I guess this has already been tried (My lecturer quotes early FHM?), or maybe their isn’t a market for such a mag.

We going with it anyway. Brainstorming names, we went from Acquiesce, to Subscribe, to ‘In’ (it could be known as In Magazine?). We tagged it with Invest. In style. Insatiable. At the moment nobody reads this blog, but if you happen to stumble upon it let me know what you think? We’re aiming to be the refined men’s interest magazine covering accessible fashion, current affairs, entertainment, technology, women (quite a generalisation I know), and sport. Our target is the younger astute male, BC1 18-30 , who aspires to be upmarket but doesn’t have the high disposable income.  We’ve got some good feature ideas that hopefully will distinguish us from the rest, but for now they are under wraps!

So as you can see I’m quite busy, and that’s just Uni stuff. DV8 are requesting copy from me for their up and coming Guildford/Woking ‘out and about’ guide, Valentines came and went, the sports centre where I work want me to look at ‘jazzing up’ (their words) the text on their site, and I’m hooked on Devil May Cry 4on Xbox 360. Oh the life of a journo student!

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Tags: Canvas, My Work, Online Journalism