Will Rowe – Media Blog

In the voice thread above, I outline the competition I could face in the market, as well as how my indie magazine will be different but still abide by the conventions of an indie magazine. By creating this task I also found that physical magazines are sparse in the market.

Researching the meta narrative of The Smiths helped me understand how much is put into how a band appears to the public, it also helped me understand Richard Dyer’s theory of the paradox of the star, this can be found in The Smiths as they present extraordinary skill and at the same time go on sell out tours, while dressing in average clothes and living an average life, this creates the idea of them being both extraordinary and ordinary, as well as appearing as present and absent.

This will be useful when creating my magazine cover, as my star will have to have their own meta-narrative and be conventional and slightly different of the indie genre. Below is a Mise-en-scene slide of what my indie star will look like.

Click on the image to see the full moodboard

To get inspiration for my music magazine, I created a Pinterest moodboard. This will help me moving forward as I can look back on this moodboard when I need help on how the magazine should look, The images range from Typography that I could use, to the general aesthetic of the magazine. All of the images will be important when creating my magazine as I will need to make sure that the magazine appeals to my intended audience of Indie.

Above is a dating profile I created for the typical audience member of my magazine. For this I used yougov.co.uk and researched the artists I thought would be in my magazine, then from this data I found what I would have to encode in my magazine. Then the reader would decode it for better reading, this is called preferred reading. However if the audience doesn’t like the ideas found in my magazine, this is called oppositional reading.

The target audience of this magazine are mostly older people, who are either in the working class, skilled working class or the middle class. The whole aesthetic of the magazine gives it a vintage look. The textual analysis and audience profiling will be useful when I create my own magazine as I will have to consider both my audience psychographic and audience demographic in order for my magazine to appeal to the most ideal audience.

In this post I analysed a magazine front cover and tried to find out both the demographic and physiographic information of the audience. We did this in order to get a general overview on a magazine audience. This will be useful when creating our own magazine as we will have to think of the demographic and the physiographic audience, so I will know how to tailor it for them.

In order to help us with the production of our magazine, we labelled the technical conventions (what is considered typical and expected) of a magazine cover, These include:

• Masthead – Title of the magazine.
• Pug – What is special about the issue.
• Plug – pushing a message, such as ‘Best issue yet’.
• Main cover line – The main feature of the magazine.
• cover lines – what else is in the magazine.
• Main cover star – photo of whoever is mentioned in the main cover line.
• Issue – When the magazine was published.
• Price – how much the magazine is.
• Bar-code – used for scanning the magazine, normally found in the bottom right.

With this research, I now know the conventions of a magazine cover, which I will be able to use when creating my own magazine cover.