Evaluation- FaqFashion

I worked on the group blog with Radmila, Larisa, Ave, Nassia, Aneta and Alicia. The six of us decided that we wanted to blog about fashion. We knew this was a popular topic among existing bloggers and so we had to come up with ideas on how to make it different and more appealing to a web audience.

We came to the conclusion that it would be better to look at fashion as an art form and focus on the issues surrounding fashion rather than taking the typical stance of ‘what looks good‘, the aesthetic side of fashion.

We seemed to all agree on our vision for the blog at the start but most disagreement came about whilst choosing a name. Finally we agreed on FaqFashion, a clever play on words, well we thought so anyway. The idea behind the name was to generate humour and interest from our audience whilst still stating the obvious, that we were going to provide factual information about fashion.

We didn’t have an editor  and decided that everyone would have control and responsibility over their own posts. We all covered different topics within fashion, Alicia did ethics, Nassia took pictures of people on campus and blogged about ‘the Westminster style,’ Aneta did music and fashion, Larisa focused on accessories, Radmila wrote about general high street and designer fashion, Ave took the role of fashion police and I looked at unique designs, underground fashion designers and high fashion.

We had difficulty on deciding who our target audience were going to be in terms of age. We wanted to target the blog at both men and women but this wasn’t easy so we targeted women from ages 17- 25.

We stuck to a strict router when it came to posting on the blog, we each had three days in the week which we assigned to each other of when we had to post.

We wanted to make the blog as interactive as possible so we set up a twitter account, which we updated every time we posted. We also set up a facebook group to generate a following for the blog and sent messages to members informing them of any updates taking place on the blog.  This worked well at first but certain members of the group got  a bit carried away on the amount of messages that they sent to members and as a result, Radmila received complaints that messages from Faqfasion were flooding inboxs and people were getting annoyed. We dealt with the problem accordingly and agreed to only send two messages a week instead of after every post which was effectively three messages a day.

Nassia made cards with our blog url on, which we all handed out to people both on campus and on the streets of London.

In terms of multimedia content we had videos that we posted on the blog, which varied from videos we shot and posted ourselves in the form of voxpops and interviews and videos that we found on youtube. We all posted pictures and decided we would have a limit of three for each post to maintain a co-ordinated style, we also had a limit of 500 words for each post.

faqFashion Rationale

faqFashion is a group blog that deals with fashion in more than just an aesthetic way but deals with the deeper issues surrounding fashion. We look at ethics, music and fashion, fashion events, new designers, accessories and much more.

We didn’t want to have an editor on the blog and decided that it would work better if we were all in charge of our individual posts. We also worked together on the overall look of the blog.

faqtherest/ faqnewfaces: Theses are the two categories my posts tend to fall under. My job on the blog is to find new and unique high fashion by both unknown and established designers. I also write about new trends and where people can go shopping to achieve a unique style.

I set up a facebook group to help promote and gain support for the blog which has been highly successful in generating popularity.

A Story To Tell

The New York Times website has a vast video library in which it posts feature reports done by it’s journalists.

The reports are designed to be accessible to internet users. They act like mini-documentaries covering a wide range of stories and topics and tend not to be longer than 3-4 minutes. They are very informative, contain several short interviews and are edited to perfection.

Videos, blogs and vlogs are increasingly covering newspaper websites who are trying to compete with big broadcasters like CNN and BBC. Articles on the New York Times website are often followed by a short video covering the same story, giving their readers the option of either watching or reading the story or maybe even doing both, giving them more of a choice in how they want to consume information.

The New York Times website even has podcasts, allowing people to listen to the days news on the go, which shows that the website tries to cater for different audiences. New technologies such as ipods were once a threat to the industry for a fear that they would act as mediums to deter people from the traditional trend of reading newspapers. Now the NYtimes and many more have embraced new technologies by finding ways to work with technology and draw in new and old audiences.

The internet has allowed us to see a mergance of mediums which would once have not been possible in the print industry.  This helps papers to maintain readership loyalty and attract new audiences as websites are accessible all over the world.