How our media product represents a particular social group:

By Sadie Quinn.

Geographical locationThe Isle of Wight…

– We have targeted a specific geographical location which we hope you will find to be evident when you hear our final bulletin. Due to the requirement of creating a local radio news bulletin, it was necessary to appeal to individuals from the south of England. Therefore we deduced that strong accents such as Welsh, Scottish or northern would perhaps not be as comprehendible as a typical southern accent; we tried to speak clearly and pronounce each word as best as we could in accordance to how we thought people in our local area. However, we attempted to avoid some of the Isle of Wight’s colloquial language, such as the term ‘somewhen’, which would not be used in other areas of England- so as to keep the bulletin professional. With the Isle of Wight festival and the Bestival, music is a massive part of Island life and so radio is extremely popular down here.

Gender

– We tried to maintain a gender-neutral bulletin because our target audience is not gender-specific. We did this by using a male news reporter as well as the two females (Jenna and I) as we felt this created the potential for a wider audience, one that could be attracted to a radio station that is not dictated by either males or females but instead recites the current news without bigotry or the potential for claims of gender inequality within the industry, as this is too common in modern society.

Age

– Our target audience is, however, age-specific. Our target audience can be characterized as young individuals around the ages of sixteen through to the early twenties. We chose this target audience as we felt as though we could use our own experience (being young people ourselves) to create a bulletin that we felt we could also engage with. I feel as though we accomplished this by keeping each story as short as we possibly could so that the impact of each story would not be too overwhelming for the adolescent following. Additionally, we recognized that the use of three young presenters was perhaps another way to conform to the inclinations of our audience.

Social class

– We did not initially attempt to aim our radio station at an identifiable social group as we felt that, in general, it is difficult to pin-point young people as just one social class; the fact that the majority of them do not have a job could make them a member of a lower class, yet the fact that a large number of us are a part of the educational system suggests that we have more cultural knowledge, meaning that we could also be categorised as middle or established middle class. Because it is so difficult to identify the class of a student, we decided not to do so at all. However, having analysed our script and broadcast, I could say that our language and chosen stories better conform to established middle class through to emergent service workers, however would probably not appeal to either the ‘precariat’ class or the social ‘elite’.