The assignment I have applied Creative Fluency too is a Newspaper project for my Humanities Honours 9 class back in late October, just after the Canadian Federal Election. The assignment covers the front page of a newspaper, where we would create our own paper name, article headlines and stories. Since the main focus was on current events, most examples included at least one article on the Federal Election, tied in with other front page headlines for the time.
The Five “I’s”
Identify
The overall goal to accomplish was to replicate the average local newspaper, such as the Vancouver Sun or The Province. The frontpage would be the primary focus of the project. We would have to design our own paper, write our own articles and insert our own images.
One obstacle we had to avoid was information bias. The paper ideally had to be bias free, which can be difficult as we relied on sources for our information. To overcome this, I ran through multiple sources for the same topic, that way preventing the risk of information bias.
Inspire
The projects inspiration mostly stemmed from local papers in our area. Notable papers include the Tri-City News and the afromentioned Vancouver Sun and The Province. I took a look at collected examples and other online news sites for inspiration. Front page articles aren’t usually catagorized into sections such as politics and sports but rather hot topics from various genres. I would format my paper around this concept.
Interpolate
With my research done, I put together my ideas that I came up with from the inspiration. The paper headlines are generally things that are important to the community, in this case a local paper with focus on local headlines and global news. I then looked into the writing style of the newspaper companies. I drew up my articles based on getting the most important information out first, then prioritizing the secondary pieces of information.
Imagine
With the planning phase done, I began work on the newspaper itself. My life was made a lot easier with the fact it was being done in a word document and that the template was already provided. It took me about 3 nights to complete the entire newspaper and an additional day to fix mistakes and go over it. I structured it with the biggest headline at the top and the stories gradually decreasing in importance as you went down.
One part I struggled on was the sub-articles. As it was hard to look up such minescule events that would fit in the boxes, I ended up making up some of the stories while having to summarize larger stories in the boxes.
Inspect
Refering back to the Inspire section, I could see that my paper met my goals. The overall style matched that of a local paper, as oppossed to a Government owned outlet. Despite that, my choice of name (“The National Word”) may seem a bit odd, but remember that it focuses on local and country-wide/global stories as a local paper. I believed that I fully managed to avoid any biases in writing. I mostly assured this by only telling the “five W’s” (Who?, What?, When?, Why?, Where?) as main points.
The Creative Fluency concept proved itself a nice fit here and I will make sure to apply it to other projects as often as possible. Although, I imagine that the steps are the basic steps to creating any project, and would be applied no matter the situation for a creative project.
