As a group, we carried out some research into how the media portrays teenagers as planned. We did this by looking at copies of our local paper, the Warrington Guardian and by looking at news stories available online. In order to make it easier to find out whether there were more positive or negative stories we divided a piece of sugar paper into two separate columns, positive and negative. We then cut out any story related to teenagers and stuck them on the side depending on whether they were positive or negative, allowing us to get an idea of the public perception of teenagers. As expected, we found that there were many more stories on the negative side than on the positive side. I was in no way surprised that this would be the case, but the disparity in the positive and negative stories was alarming, especially as we know that there are lots of teenagers doing good things like volunteer work and representing the town in sports competitions for example, the Duke of Edinburgh team representing Great Sankey High School, which I myself am a part of.

At this point, we realised that there was a potential bias in media, which we felt was unacceptable because of the strength of media influence over the community at large. We then decided to write to the local paper to inquire about the lack of positive stories and to persuade them to publish more in future if at all possible. It is possible that either they are unaware of the disparity in positive and negative stories on teenagers or they hold some kind of bias towards publishing negative stories.

We also spoke to Mrs Stubbs, who supervises the school's internet and Twitter outlets and asked her to include more stories about us doing things in the local community.