News Practical Task

1. Explain your role/responsibility within the team and the task. What were you required to do?
Harvey and I were in charge of creating The Telegraph's social media pages within our team, with Dara, Derek and Zain working on The Telegraph Online and Morgan and Andreas creating The Daily Telegraph newspaper. I was in charge of the whole Twitter page, where I chose the story, an image, a post and a Twitter headline, and Harvey and I both contributed towards the Facebook page, where I was delegated to choose the image for the story and the page's cover photo.

2. For one media form, describe the codes and conventions you chose to follow and explain their intended impact.
For the Twitter, I began by choosing the story about the Brexit deal being agreed as this was going to be the main story for The Telegraph Online and so by promoting it on the Twitter, it would be more likely to get more hits overall. I also chose MCU two-shot of Theresa May shaking hands with the President of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, both with big smiles and the UK and EU flags behind them to create a celebratory tone for the post. A very similar picture of the two politicians was also chosen for the Facebook page with a more concise wording of the same story for the post, "Britain is out of the EU after a deal is agreed." This is a convention of The Telegraph's Facebook page and would allow the audience to recognise the same story but perhaps understand it better in the clearer wording. For the Instagram page, Harvey chose a picture of Oxford Street and overlayed it with bars of pink with "Does the internet mean the end for the Christmas high street?" in a black font. This follows conventions of The Telegraph being focused on London and putting a caption over the photo, which they often do on Instagram. As well as this, a professional picture was chosen which would appeal to the target audience, who would open Instagram to look at pretty pictures.

3. Explain how your choices reflect the real newspaper's values and target audience.
Our choice to make the Facebook page's cover photo a picture of the Union Jack flag with the Big Ben and Houses of Parliament in the background reflected the London-centric perspective of The Telegraph's audience. As well as this, we wrote our headlines to signify Theresa May as a good leader and chose the headline "Theresa May feels ‘a weight removed off her shoulders’ after Brexit deal agreed in historic divorce talks in Brussels" as the Twitter headline to allow the audience to sympathise with Theresa May as they would support her government and party. We chose not to feature the Brexit story across all three social media platforms and instead created our Instagram headline around the story that 'Christmas High Street sales figures significantly down as shoppers choose the internet.' This is due to the younger age of Instagram's audience in comparison to the other social medias, and perhaps the fact that they would be slightly more interested with the festive event of Christmas shopping than the more continual talk of Brexit.

4. Explain how your team adapted the news across the three different media forms and the reasons behind your decisions.
We chose to not include the Trump headline about his 'Twitter troubles' on the website (although it featured as a secondary story on The Daily Telegraph's front page) as we believed that it would probably feature under a section of the website rather than on the front page. We also chose different pictures across all the platforms to make each unique, with one large scenic shot of the snow on the print version, two Brexit and one Christmas high street on the social media platforms and 5 smaller photographs for the online version, which is conventional to the style of that media form.

5. In hindsight, is there anything about your team's outcomes that you would adapt or improve?
In hindsight, our team would change the Facebook headline "Britain is officially no longer part of the EU" to something about the Brexit deal itself being agreed, which is what was featured on all the other forms (we realised this towards the end of our practical task and didn't have enough time to change it.) I may have also not had the bold textboxes on the Telegraph Online as they look slightly out-of-place and unlike the website. Other than that, I think our team prepared very well for the task and worked as well as we could, with the tight time restrictions, on the day of the practical task.