Digital News: Our Idea | Student Yak

To begin this unit, our group sat down and discussed our ideas. We had already decided by this point that we wanted to do something funny that was aimed at students. I pitched an idea to the group based on something I had done over the summer as a personal project: Student Yak. As a group, we decided that this would be our brand.

Our Logo

STUDENT YAK

The best way to sum this idea up is in the form of a 25 word pitch:

"Student Yak aims to find entertaining news and views from all corners of the Internet, and bring it to you. Made by students, for students"

Our digital news channel will focus on the funny side of the news, and take a satirical look at the serious side. It's called Student Yak because we are students and yak is another word for talk, which is what we like to do a lot, it's as simple as that.

In terms of branding, we decided that the website and all the content should have a bright and fun feel to it. We decided to use orange and purple as our colours, because we felt that fit best with the style we were aiming for. We wanted all the branding to match across all platforms, so we didn't want to come up with something to complicated.

When looking at news stories, because of the broadness of our central idea, we can look at anything, as long as there is some link to students, or we beleive its a story students would be interested in. To help split the news stories up, we came up with some categories for the website:

• Viral Yak- Focuses on stories about viral internet phenomena, like viral videos and memes. One idea Ida had was to end each video with a 'meme of the day'.
• (Un)Social Yak- Focuses on stories about social media, like twitter reactions to certain events.
• TV/Film Yak- Focuses on stories about the latest films and TV shows, like the best Netflix series, or a 60 second review of a new movie.
• Celebrity Yak- Focuses on the latest celebrity stories like relationships and Twitter beefs.
• Tech Yak- Focuses on stories about the latest technology, like the release on the new iPhone.
• Super Serious Yak- Focuses on the more serious stories that relate to students, for example we may encourage students to get the Meningitis jab.

OUR AIMS

We want this show and it's website to be a platform for all things student. We want students to get all their news from us first. We want students to see all the most popular, viral internet phenomena on our social media/show/website first. We want students to talk about the things they see on our show. We beleive our show and branding we help us do this.

NEWS STORIES

When thinking about news, we chose to think of it as something new, something people don't know about, something we think people should know about. By thinking about it like this, it made it easier to think about what stories we could feature.

We spoke about a few initial ideas we had. The first one was about viral videos. We wanted to investigate how things go viral, and what it is like to go viral. We spoke about possibly finding a youtuber to interview, seen as they would probably know a fair bit about the lifestyle and about viral videos.

Our second story idea was about the amount of sequels and prequels that are being made by the film industry. We thought we could go out to the public and find out if people really want to keep seeing the same thing over and over again. We spoke about how the film industry only continue to make sequels and prequels if the originals are very popular, so is it our own fault that they keep making them?

By the end of the meeting we decided that our next step should be to develop these ideas and attempt to find stories for each category. I said I would continue to develop the viral video idea, Ida said she would look at an idea for (Un)Social Yak, Becca said she would look for a story for Celebrity Yak, and Nisserin said she would find a story for TV/Film Yak.

INITIAL GRAPHIC DESIGNS

Whilst talking about graphic design and branding, I showed everyone the graphics I had used for the project I had worked on over the summer. The group liked them, so I said I would go away and work on them so they fit with our new brand. I needed to create opening titles, bumpers, lower thirds, transitions, and closing titles.

Original branding

NEXT STEPS

To prepare for our next meeting I will:

• Begin to develop the viral video story
• Work on the graphic designs
• Set up a website

I am looking forward to this project, I have a very fun group who are willing to try new things, and create something different, which is what we hope to achieve as our outcome.