Magazine Research

So, we've been analysing magazines recently- the object of this research was to establish audience institutions and target audiences. All very relevant to our 'thriller opening' work, in the sense that it helped us to build skills in how to establish a specific audience and how to conform to the expectations of that audience. As a class, we discussed and analysed our research in order to collectively create a mindmap, which can be found below...


Developing a Mindmap as a Class!














This research was a comprehensive analysis of the magazine industry in the year of 2013 (as I've discovered, media is an ever-changing part of society that is constantly evolving). The task allowed me to broaden my knowledge of the magazine industry, including new vocabulary:- Synergy: The coming together of many parts to form a stronger whole.
Convergence: The coming together of two or more media (e.g. smart phones, www).
This new vocabulary develops my understanding media as a whole, and the business aspects of media that are fundamental to the industry, such as expansion, NMT's and Intertextuality.

Then, we went into further depth and we were each assigned a magazine to research in further depth. I was give women's glossy Cosmopolitan UK, a magazine that, admittedly, wouldn't otherwise catch in my eye. In other words, I was an outsider looking in on an incredibly popular magazine, and it was my job to understand, quintessentially, why this magazine was so popular and how it's grown into such a phenomenon. This was designed in order to help me understand genre, target audience,  as well as how NMT's have affected the brand, and how Cosmo has expanded into the brand it has become. And, most importantly, I would be learning about these things within a specific case study, rather than being generalised.

And so here was the presentation I gathered from my research:-



The point of this presentation was to build up an understanding of a specific magazine. Presenting our work in small groups meant that we could expand our knowledge and apply that to various other publications. And so, in an exam, I can refer to these case studies with a more comprehensive understanding of the magazine industry. Also, I would find whilst doing this presentation that the same question kept popping into my head: how does this apply to our coursework? This work truly was relevant to our coursework. A large part of that coursework is evaluating and reflecting upon how your two minutes is able to fulfil the expectations of a target audience. Whilst Cosmo may use pink fonts and colours to convey a sense of girliness and femininity, how is our choice of lighting, sound, mise-en-scene being used to construct a meaning for our target audience? And so this research task, albeit in a different area of media (magazines as opposed to films), I found this task massively helpful to my understanding of genres, conventions and target audiences...