I have now had all the feedback I need to decide over my political/humerous dilemma. I'm definitely going to go for the humerous. I feel so much more comfortable doing this. The idea of writing competely serious-toned stories, taking a political approach, and fooling people without a trace would have been a clever way to do it, but I much prefer the other idea.
At the start of this project, my focus was just on making people believe the things I told them. Since then I have also become interesting in spoofing the media. Pointing out its controlling side, it's ridiculous side, the side which blows everything out of proportion and how it itself tries to make people believe stories, and react a certain way to them. With the humerous route that I have decided to take, I still get to fool people like before, it's just this way I get to have fun with it, and push the boundaries more. My articles will still look real. This will do a lot of fooling. Frank has also helped me decide to start off my stories seriously. The progressively get more ridiculous. Which does a little more fooling.
By doing this, I am confident that when people see my work, they will still be asking the question 'is this real?', even though the story is completley crazy.
So I guess that's the turn my project has taken, I'm not wanting to pull the wool over people's eyes completely anymore, I just want to see if I can still make them question the lies, no matter how ludicrous they really are.
I have also decided that I am definitely going to do a mixture of full articles, clippings, and headlines on sandwich boards. This is because of the difficulty of printing, and for variety. I do love the idea of having these stories displayed in a way that looks like somone's collected them, and lovingly organised them in a tatty, amateurish way.
One more thing that I have been thinking about, after a few attempts at trying to write some stories, and finding it a little hard to write in the style of a real journalist. Even though I feel pretty happy writing, it has never been my strong point. So I asked myself: Does the language have to be perfect journalism? I think with the nature of the stories, I don't know if it matters so much. Obviously it needs to seem like it's from a newspaper, but I think if it seemed as though it was written by one of the more rubbish journalists at the newspaper, I think it would only add to the charm. However I have got The Newspapers Handbook out of the library. It has shed a lot of light on style of writing and stuff. It has literally everything you need to know about journalism and newspapers in there, it's actually quite amazing. So hopefully I can make these stories as good as possible.
So a very short summary of today would be:
- Format decision = mixture of clippings and headlines
- Style decision = far fetched
- Language decision = good but not perfect
