Before creating my own Daily Mail front cover I tried to familiarise myself with the typical layout of a cover and their target audience, to do this, I made a collage of a few covers alongside the YouGov reader profile for the mail.
After the research, I then decided that I wanted to make my splash about the royal family to reflect the traditional interests of the average reader. I then decided to make my second article about the Australian bush fires but use an image of a celebrity in order to draw in the reader and stress that a typical reader would most likely be more interested in the celebrity aspect of the story rather than the environmental side. Once this was decided, I read through some previous articles of the mail to get an idea of the house style and, in doing this, noticed that when writing about Markle, often the Mail refer to her very casually as Meghan and only use her title when addressing her as well as Prince Harry. When writing my article I tried to use an editorial viewpoint that was positive about the royal family but negative towards Meghan Markle herself. In order to create this representation of Markle, I used verbs such as 'plot', 'threatening' and reject' but still used the royal titles 'Duke and Duchess of Sussex' as the typical Mail reader likes the tradition of the royal family. In terms of the Bushfires story, I used a close up image of Selena Gomez as I notices that almost all Daily Mail covers had an image of a woman, I also addressed Gomez by her first name Selena to where to the more colloquial, celebrity gossip aspects of the paper. I then created my article and headlines on word before copying them into photoshop:
- Who- duke and duchess
- What- moving
- When- recently- after their holiday
- Where- Canada
- Why – dropping royal duties
- Markle makes her move
- Nation in uproar as Markle plots move to Canada
- It has been revealed that the Duke and Duchess of Sussex may fly off and raise their family in Canada after spending an extended holiday there over Christmas. The royal pair broke royal tradition at the end of 2019 after rejecting Her Majesty The Queen’s invite to Sandringham over the festive period and have taken it one step further by threatening to leave the country all together. The Duke and Duchess are also under fire as they ‘step back’ from royal duties following the birth of their first son , Archie Harrison Mountbatten-Windsor.
- Selena Gomez is among the celebrities donating millions to the Australia Bushfire Foundation
I then began to make my cover on photoshop, ensuring that the main headline and picture took up a lot of space to adhere o tabloid conventions. I also added a weight-loss exclusive as i realised this was a common theme in post-Christmas papers. For my advert I used HSL as not only is it a brand with a similar target audience to the Mail but it also sponsors Tipping Point so this could interest a secondary audience of a similar age to the target.