How does your product engage with audiences and how would it be distributed as a real media text?
There are a number of concepts that need to be addressed to answer this question fully.
- Who is you audience?
- How did you fulfil your audiences needs and expectations?
- What is meant by distribution?
- Who owns and controls magazine distribution
- How are real media texts distributed in the online age?
Audience
You must define and describe your audience in these ways.
- Demographics and Psychographics – audience segmentation
- You should also use your Yougov findings to explain what other media texts they consume as well as other information.
Uses & Gratification
- You should link specific elements of your magazine (contents, bands, representation, language, design (fonts / graphics) to specific uses and gratifications that you think your audience have.
Distribution
- Complete this work sheet in order to explore magazine ownership & distribution.
- Read the three articles below (also in the work sheet) in groups in order to research the business of magazine distribution and the challenges created by the internet & social media.
Research Articles
- Article from journalism trade rag on decline in magazine sales.
- How print is surviving in the digital age.
- Facebook & Google – a digital duopoly?
Institutional (Distribution) Issues
- Quality (factual) journalism is expensive and so is traditional print and distribution.
- However, it’s hard to make money out of online content. Most of it goes to FB & Google, leaving everyone else scrabbling for the scraps.
- Exclusives remain ‘exclusive’ for about 10 seconds before it’s all over social media.
- How do you square this circle?
TASK:
A Dragon’s Den style sales pitch to a distributor for your magazine:
You must address the following questions:
- Describe your brand values / mission statement?
- How will your magazine be distinct from or similar to others?
- Who are your target audience?
- Use Yougov, image and profile + other details.
- Why would that audience buy your magazine?
- Must link to Uses and Gratification.
- Who would you want to work with to distribute your magazine?
- Which of the big magazine groups would you hope to work with?
- How does your magazine fit with their existing publications?
- What sort of advertiser would you hope to attract?
- Link to your two selected ads & explain.
- What strategies do you have for distribution? How will you link your print content with online content?
- How can a print magazine survive in digital world?
- Some answers & thoughts
- Increasingly sensational celebrity gossip stories – Churnalism (cheap and easy)
- Freebies.
- Reduce cover price (free) & rely on ad sales.
- Link to enhanced digital content on website.
- Employ social media to promote our brand.
- Audience participation & interaction (Uses and Gratification)
- Link digital content back to print, whet the audience’s appetite, require the audience to buy print version to get full details.
- Use a paywall for online content.