My newspaper's puzzle.

As it shows on my newspaper drawn plan i am choosing to include one puzzle on the second page. In my focus group, i found out that in order to have a new take on a traditional design, it would be a good idea to have a new take on a traditional puzzle.

My previous research on puzzles shows me that the puzzles depend on the type of audience the newspaper attracts. For example, a tabloid newspaper which features celebrities is more likely have puzzles which are celebrity themed.
On this post: http://oliviasmitha2mediastudies.blogspot.com/2011/11/puzzles.html I put a few websites which showed me where newspapers get their puzzles from, therefore i believe that this is the right route for me to go down when getting my puzzles for my newspaper page.

However, as i am writing this section more recently, i have decided that i want my puzzle to be number based and difficult - this is because my audience is intelligent because they6 are educated and also i want them to spend the most time in my newspaper so they will believe that £1.10 is reasonable enough to spend on a newspaper which takes them a long time to read.

So what type of puzzle takes a long time to do, can be varied in difficulties and is for the intelligent reader? - sudoku!

As sudoku is a type of puzzle which is a logic-based Japanese number placement puzzle. I myself do them frequently on various different levels of difficulty. I was going to make a list of different newspapers which choose to have sudoku in their pages however, the puzzles that newspapers have can change weekly and also, sooo many newspapers have sudoku in them.

History of Sudoku

The recent and extreme popularity of sudoku in British newspapers came in around 2004 under the name 'Su Doku'. When one newspaper published the puzzle, another did it the next day when they saw how popular it had become overnight.


Sudoku doesn't have any copyrighted factors about it as they are just a combination of numbers. This means that i can replicate the order of the numbers for my sudoku puzzle from another, existing puzzle.

I did this sudoku puzzle in my spare time just to see how difficult a difficult sudoku is:

This was really difficult, but it isn't impossible. i mustn't rely on what i think about this puzzle too much as i am not the prime target audience. If i were to put a sudoku puzzle in my newspaper i would have to then put the answer to it in the next issue - this is because in order for the reader of this issue to want to know if they got the puzzle right, they would have to buy the next issue.

I have also looked at the aesthetics of a sudoku puzzle in a newspaper. This is from a national newspaper:

There was a easy sudoku to the left of this one, giving the reader the chance to do a puzzle which suits them - and also because this newspaper has such a wide target audience it needs to cater for most people, therefore put in puzzles of different difficulties.

I researched this because i wanted to see how newspapers of this present time layout their sudoku puzzles. From this scanned page i can see that the solutions to yesterday's puzzle are to the left, therefore it pushes the reader to buy the next issue to find the answers and puzzles.

There is also instructions of what to do which i have written one myself. I will put this next to my puzzle:

"Enter numbers into the blank spaces so that each row, column and 3x3 box contains the numbers 1 to 9."

This is a simple way of saying what i want. i didn't want to write too much because more than likely the reader knows what they are doing, I'm just informing those who surprisingly don't.

This is my first newspaper issue, therefore i do not need to write 'yesterday's solutions' because there was no yesterday. If i were making many issues of this newspaper, i would of course after the first issue put the solutions down. 

I would also have to state that this is a 'diffucult' puzzle so the readers no and they aren't caught off guard. I know i could have made a puzzle which made like a competition, where the reader sends their completed puzzle in the post to see if they have got everything right in order to then win a prize, however i felt like my target audience want something quick to read and the purpose of my newspaper is to be a form of quick intellectual information.

Finally, having a sudoku puzzle supports my slogan of culture.