Illegal File Sharing Evaluation

Evaluation

In this assignment I had to do some research on the music industry and file sharing and prepare a piece of feature journalism on the changing face of the music industry for a magazine of my choice which was Glamour who mainly target teenage girls and women up to the age of around 49.

I had to research the positive and negative aspects of file sharing and music piracy and the effects on the audience, the music industry, artists and the sites offering file sharing.  My first source of information was an article from BBC Newsbeat. It talked about how piracy started in the early 2000s and how it has grown to the present day. After gaining an insight into the world of file sharing I decided to research more into the topic getting more facts from sources such as the BBC and BPI and copying them onto a word document. I then shared my ideas with my group and after the class debate, had enough information to cover both sides of the argument. I think researching in favour of the proposition given to us (“illegal file sharing is destroying the music industry”) wasn’t very difficult because there are a lot of facts to support the statement online from valid sources including how file sharing has affected the music industry in the past, and what affect it will have on it in the future. Sharing ideas with the class was also very useful because I was able to gather a wide selection of arguments for both the affirmative and negative sides of the proposition. Finding valid articles in favour of file sharing was a bit difficult as I wasn’t able to find many valuable sources. Most of the articles I found were just what other people had posted as their opinion, there weren’t many facts.

I didn’t find the journalistic part of the project difficult. I found it quite enjoyable as I would say I am quite good at writing. I don’t think my writing is boring and I try to engage the reader by using rhetorical questions to get the reader involved.

I was new to using InDesign but I don’t think it was very difficult. I used rulers to create margins and textboxes so layout my article the way I wanted it. I inserted images and resized them to the size I found appropriate. I used different fonts for my texts and different colours. I also included captions in my article so the reader was aware on what the images were showing. I wrote these captions in brackets but after getting feedback, I got rid of the brackets and decided to put the captions in a different colour so the reader wouldn’t confuse it with the article. I then exported my article to a JPEG file ready to upload in onto Blogger.

I wasn’t able to assess my web Publishing skills because I wasn’t able to publish my article onto my blog as the network wouldn’t allow me.

I then decided to get feedback from some of my peers. I got positive feedback on the colours I used, fonts, and images but I also got constructive criticism on some aspects of my article that I could improve. I was told that I could’ve included an introduction to let the reader know exactly what the article was going to be about. Also, I was told that the second to last paragraph may have forgotten the target audience because as a reader, it wasn’t understood. Also, I was told that the font size didn’t look consistent.

Overall, I think that in this assignment I performed quite well seeing as it was my first time using InDesign and even though I could have improved my layout/text size etc., I believe that my work was of a good standard.