DIGITAL NEWS: Initial Ideas

After our briefing session, Katie, Alex, Jason and myself starting brainstorming ideas to start us off with the news project. We started by thinking of the branding and said we wanted our audience to be around our age (19-25) and we wanted it to be a funny news article as we've created a lot of serious bits in the previous projects we wanted to do something slightly more light-hearted. 

Potential subjects:
- TV/film/Netflix
- Politics (Brexit)
- Health
- Charity
- Students
- Drinking/alcohol

Potential stories:
- Dreamland
- Myths and disproving them
- Stoptober/stay sober/movember
- Is Netflix taking over? Do people watch regular TV anymore?

We had a talk with Helen, giving her all these ideas to see what she thought of them. With Helen, we agreed on combining e-cigarettes, alcohol and myths/misconceptions. These are all things which can be directed towards young adults which will suit our audience choice (19-25). We all brainstormed these ideas and created little stories that could go with them e.g. we could do something about hangover cures to go with the alcohol section and we could do a e-cigarettes Vs cigarettes - what one is healthier. 

Myths - social misconceptions/de-bunking
- E-cigarettes/vaping healthier than cigarettes (Jason)
- Alcohol: social/health - hangover cures - like old wives tales? (Alex)
- Myth-busting - definitions - what does it mean? - a view or opinion that is incorrect because it's based on faulty thinking or misunderstanding (Katie)
- Absurd - sneezing with your eyes open etc. (Melissa)

Red Lion news report

After our talk with Helen about what idea routes to go down we each picked bits which we would research individually. I started looking at ridiculous urban myths below:

URBAN MYTHS 

‘An urban myth is a strange or surprising story which many people believe but which is not actually true.’

Examples of urban myths

- Bloody Mary

- ‘The spider bite'

- The licked hand

- Chain letters

- The slender man

Debunked common myths & misconceptions

- “Bulls hate the colour red” - Bulls are actually colour blind, they actually react to the motion of the bullfighters’ cloth as a perceived threat.

- “Napoleon was short” - Napoleon was 5’7”, actually above the average height for a Frenchman of his time.

- “Don’t wake sleepwalkers” - They’ll be really confused but it’s fine to do so. It’s probably more dangerous letting them sleepwalk.  

- “Missing persons report” - Police don’t demand a 24-hour period before accepting a missing person's report.

- “Don’t go swimming on a full stomach” - Eating before swimming doesn’t increase risk of cramps, alcohol is the biggest risk increaser. A full stomach will just make you out of breath. 

- “Goldfish have a 3 second memory” - Goldfish are not the smartest but they have a memory span of 3 months.

https://io9.gizmodo.com/52-of-the-worlds-most-widespread-myths-and-misconceptio-1656550980

Katie did the research about myth-busting:


Unknowingly, Katie and myself ended up both looking at one of the same websites so our information is similar.

Jason did the research about e-cigarettes:

& Alex looked into the effects of alcohol and Macmillan's 'Go Sober For October' campaign:

After each researching different parts we all decided to definitely go down this route as we already have ideas on who to contact e.g. Macmillan should definitely be up for talking to us, seeing as they endorsed Stoptober, we think this time would be best to talk to them about it (september/october time). E-cigarettes are most popular now more than ever before and will just get more popular throughout the years so it would be interesting to talk to someone about that too. The whole idea of myth busting is very interesting so I am looking forward to seeing what story we can come up with for that one. Even if we combine them so we look at myths surrounding e-cigarettes and hangover cures?