Hello welcome to my blog, where I will be posting my AS media work over the next year.

The Four F's

The Four F's consist of format, formula, frame and function.

1-Format: The format is the design of the every magazine issue. This is to maintain the magazines house style and theme. This includes the logo, cover lines, size of the magazine, department headers and other things that are repeatedly found in every issue. 

2-Formula: This is the editorial content of the magazine - what's in it. It includes the type of articles, the length of them, departments in the front and back of the magazine (sections that are in the magazine each time).

3-Frame: The frame is the standard size for outer page margins and the middle. Many magazines use the same margin width all the way through the magazine. Others vary the width, for example using tall top margins for features to be set apart.

4-Function: The function of the magazine is simply the point of the magazine. It's what message the magazine is trying to send to the customers.



Magazine Analysis

Social Identity

Tajfel and Turner(1979) proposed that there are three mental processes involved in evaluating others as 'us' or 'them' (i.e. 'in-group' and 'out group). These take place in particular order.

Categorisation: We categorise people including ourselves in order to understand the social environment.

Social Identification: We adopt the identification of the group we have  categorised ourselves as belonging to. There will be an emotional significance to your identification with a group, and your self esteem will become bound up with a group membership.

Social Comparison: Once we have categorised ourselves as part of a group and have been identified with that group we then tend to compare that group with other groups.

What is NRS?

The National Readership Survey is a combined company between the UK between Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA), the Newspaper Publishers Association (NPA) and the Periodical Publishers Association (PPA).'

It gives information about audience research in magazines and newspapers in the UK. It covers the top 250 major newspapers and magazines, showing the size and nature of the audiences they have. Below there are some results for the top music magazines:








These results show:

• From these results I can see that 156,000 people read NME (New Musical Express)magazine. 93,000 of these are categorised as ABC1 (rich-middle class) and only 63,000 are C2DE (middle-poor class).This shows that the majority of the people that read NME are high middle class people.
• Next we can see the age ranges that read NME. We can see that 97,000 people aged between 15-34 read the magazine and only 59,000 people aged 35+read it. This means the majority of NME readers are young. However the results are not that accurate as the range of age is too wide. Their could be 90,000 25-34 year olds reading it and only 7,000 15-24 year olds. The interests of a 15 years old to a 34 year old can be very different as well as a 35-100 year old.
• Lastly we can see that 110,000 male readers and 46,000 female readers. This shows there are more male readers for this magazine. However again this could be inaccurate as not all men have the same interests and not all females have the same interests so it is hard to judge whether or not this magazine is mainly for a female or a male.

Miss representation


Representations of men and women in magazines:
Males and females are both represented in different ways in magazines. Females are normally represented in a sexual way ,they are objectified. presented as a sexual 'object' of desire for a male. This all comes unto the fact that most of the highest jobs within the industry are fulfilled by males. They get the pictures for magazines taken in a way that they would personally like, along with a heterosexual man ,they don't normally take into account that other people might not like these images. Males however are shown in a strong powerful way. I noticed that in some cases men might of been topless, but even then these images were not meant to please a heterosexual woman, I felt like they showed the mans muscles as a strength game between men. Each man would show their muscles to compete with another (the whole idea of my muscles are bigger than yours).Another thing I found was the facial expressions were completely different. Males would normally have a stern serious face and females usually have a "inviting' 'smiley' almost less independent look.

The issues magazine editors face:
Nowadays magazine editors face many issues. This is mainly because people are more aware and feminism/equality are bigger things. They have to be careful with getting the right balance, they need to make sure the front cover is someone most people want to look at so it attracts them into buying it, but however they cannot degrade women. They also have to make sure their images and language used in articles are appropriate so they don't offend anyone. Not many editors actually take this into account as they are narrow minded as to how a magazine should be.

The Laura Mulvey 'The Male Gaze':
In 1970 Laura Mulvey came up with 'The Male Gaze' theory. Her theory argues that women in films are just objects to be 'gazed' at, as the camera acts as a masculine eye from a male viewpoint. It all comes down to 'masculine desire'.

• The camera hovers on the curves of the female body with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact.
• Through editing and framing the female body gets 'cut' into pieces ,creating a passive object to be 'gazed' at.
• events which occur to women are presented largely in the context of a man's reaction to these events. 

  MEN LOOK AT WOMEN
  WOMEN LOOK AT WOMEN 
  WOMEN LOOK AT THEMSELVES

The Majorie Ferguson Theory:
In 1980 Majorie identified the four types of facial expressions in the cover photos of magazines.

   Chocolate Box    Invitational   Romantic/Sexual  Super-Smiler

Chocolate box: This is when the model is half smiling or full smiling, lips together or slightly parted, usually the teeth are barely visible and the head is either full or three quarters to the camera.
Invitational: Only a hint of a smile, head to one side or looking back to the camera. The picture normally suggests a sense of mischief or mystery .Its a soft sexual sell, can be seen as sexual as well as innocent.
Romantic/Sexual: Includes more than one person, it has an aspirational feel (people want to be like them).The vibe is sensual and dreamy.
Super-smiler: Full face and full teeth smile.The projected mood is 'look at me'.

Unconventional Magazine

David Carson (graphic designer)did not follow the conventional features of magazines, in fact he went against the normal conventions. His quirky magazine covers were very controversial.David challenged the normal layouts and designs, all his magazines were different, unlike normal magazines which normally have the same colour scheme each time they do a new issue he completely changed i. This was risky as people want to be able to find their magazine easy but making it so different hard sometimes made it hard to spot/find. 

David Carson's Unconventional Magazines

The 50 Quid Bloke

A term Nick Hepworth came up with to describe a retail customer type. Nick believes the fifty quid bloke is the last hope of the music magazine, the only ones buying hard copies of music not downloads.
Patterns of music consumption have changed, there is other ways of getting music like spotify and iTunes. Not as many people buy CD's anymore, majority of the music customers other than downloads are older men.

Music Magazine Comparison 

Questionnaire

We had to make a questionnaire to help see what the majority of our target audience prefer. My questionnaire consisted of 20 questions,they ranged between simple yes/no questions ad open questions.

I asked 34 people,their age ranged between 11-17. These were all females as,in my research I found that a lower percentage of women read music magazines then men,so my magazine is going to be targeted at women.

I asked the question 'How often do you buy a magazine?', I gave the option of 4 answers, 'Weekly''Monthly''Yearly''Never'.As you can see from the pie chart a lot of people buy their magazine 'Monthly 'and very few brought one 'weekly'.This questions has now helped me to understand how often I would have to produce my magazine.

The next question I asked was 'How much would you be willing to pay for a magazine?'. I gave the options of £0-£1.50, £1.51-£2.00, £2.01-£3.00, £3.01-£4.50, £4.51+. My result show that 9 people would pay £0-£1.50 ,14 people would pay £1.51-£2.00 ,7 people would pay £2.01-£3.00 ,2 people would pay £3.01-£4.50 ad 2 people would pay £4.51+.From these results I have made the decision that i will try and aim my price range at £1.51-£2.00 because that is the most common answer selected.

I then asked 'What colour scheme would you like?',their options of choice were 'pastel colours', 'Monochrome(black&white)', 'Dark colours(black,red,green)', 'Bright vibrant colours' and 'Mixture'.




PIE CHART







As you can see, the majority selected Pastel colours shortly followed by bright/vibrant.Not many people selected Dark colours, monochrome or mixture.So the colour scheme I will probably follow will either be Pastel or Bright/vibrant as they have the highest interest.

I later asked if they prefer 1 central image or a collection of small images. 17 people preferred 1 central image meaning that 17 people liked a collection of small images. So i have already made the decision that my front cover will be 1 central image and my double spread will be a small collection of pictures.

Next I asked the main question 'What music genre do you prefer?'. This was a open question so people wrote what they wanted I did not have tick boxes.

From this we can clearly see the most popular genre is pop.But however I did notice that my main target audience 15-17 were not as interested about pop as the 11-14 year olds.

Due to having to create a double page spread I thought it was best to ask what content they are mainly drawn to, giving them the options of 'Fashion' 'Interviews' 'New in'. 21 people said Fashion, that is a large majority so although it is a music magazine I might include a bit of fashion. 4 people said they were drawn by the interviews,6 people liked the New in and then 3 people said they loved it all.

Reader Profile

Gender: Female
Age: 15-25
ABC: C2DE 
Religion: Any
Education: Upper-school,sixth-form,college and university 
Occupation: Part time job 

Income: £0-£300 
Status: Single
Nationality: British