Research - Exploring the Media (pages 116-128)

Magazines - Naomi Hodkinson 
This section explores three magazine titles which together investigate the areas of genre, narrative and representation. 

• Magazines come in a wide range of sub-genres which include lifestyle magazines, comics and online editions. Consider how they differ from newspapers. Magazine coverage is often more detailed but with less timely information. Features are more likely to be included than hard news, as well as being monthly etc rather than daily like newspapers. 
• Magazines' content and audience are more specialised and focused than newspapers. Magazine consumers appreciate information which is specifically aimed at their needs and interests. 
• On the cover of a magazine, conventions such as titles, taglines, price, dates, straplines, and images are likely to appear. Most will also have a contents page and editors section and will carry advertising. 

Analysing a magazine: the cover

A magazine cover is always on display so is it's 'face'. People buy magazine on the spur of the moment so usually at first glance they can generally tell whether the magazine is for them or not.  To understand how to make judgements, consider a range of elements:

• Title: what connotations does it carry? Cosmopolitan connotes someone who is at ease anywhere in the world. 
• Strapline/Tagline: Can be linked to brand identity/house style and to the title's values; so to the ideas about target audience. 
• Fonts & colours: what do they suggest about the title's brand identity and target audience?  For example, teen girls' magazines like Mizz employ pastel colours and round, 'friendly' fonts. 
• Main image: often a woman gazing into a camera. How femininity is represented, however, varies widely between sub-genres.
• Anchorage & cover lines: Reveals a great deal about title's ideologies and target audience.
• Other tactics may range from use of stars and celebrities, to sensationalism and cover-mounted 'freebies'.  

Analysing a magazine: between the covers

• Contents pages: Offer not only an overview of  features but a sense of title's brand identity  through mode of address and design style. 
• Editor's letter: Part of magazine's brand identity and connection with it's audience; a personal touch. 
• Two-page spreads: Primary unit of design.
• Advertisements: Given magazines' highly specialised audiences, the advertising they carry is also precisely targeted. 

The magazine industry is generally dominated by major publishers, with a few notable exceptions like The Big Issue and Private Eye. Major magazine publishers include IPC, EMAP, Bauer, Conde Nast, NatMags and BBC Magazines. Many popular commercial magazine titles are global and are published in different countries. The globalisation of the magazine industry suggests the magazine producers make stereotypical assumptions about their audiences. The magazine audience is an increasingly fractionised one. The titles have a clearly defined and focused target audience. They target these audiences with a mode of address which 'speaks their language' and may contain preferred readings which their target audience is likely to agree with. 

Total Film 

Future Publishing, £3.80 monthly. ABCs: 85,616

Publishes over 150 magazines worldwide. It holds the official licence for magazines from Microsoft, Sony, Disney and Nintendo to publish titles like Official Nintendo Magazine. Total Film features reviews of new films but also celebrates old ones and countdowns of, for instance, 'the top one hundred Hollywood players'. The title has an extremely consistent format and layout. 

• On the cover - features which are indicated in the cover lines. 
• Plus - the section on features which didn't make the cover. 
• Buzz - film news and gossip. 
• Lounge - home entertainment news and features. 
• Every edition starts with a planner of the month's movie guide and a forum of readers' letters, and rounds off with quizzes and a film-related competition. 

Total Film is described as 'vibrant, funny and accessible, mixing A-list glitz with indie attitude, instant hits with timeless classics.' The mode of address for Total Film is playful, masculine and youthful. The magazine manages to avoid being either too specialised or too 'laddish' by using an assertive yet informal tone. The stereotypical representations of gender in Total Film reflect the gender bias in the mainstream Hollywood film industry. Future Publishing sells this audience to advertisers in a range of ways. It claims that the average demographic is 75% male and 26 years of age. 

Grazia

EMAP (Bauer), £1.90 weekly, ABCs: 227,083

Grazia was originally launched in Italy in 1938 and is owned by Italy's market-leading publisher Mondadori. It's the number one weekly glossy in Italy and the UK and now features advertisements for D&G, Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Emporio Armani and so on. It is currently owned by Bauer who spent £8 million in the first year and a total of £16 million in the first three years and  sales are gradually increasing. The magazine combines glossy fashion with A-list celebrity gossip and elements of real life.

 It is issues weekly so stays up-to-date and creates a hybrid mix of popular genres: comtemporary but at the same time old-fashioned. Grazia offers  readers narrative pleasures by constructing narratives about A-list celebrities: cover lines use sensationalism or create  enigmas. It can be identified in the familiar format and structure of the magazine, with its consistent design style and regular features. Grazia is more accessible to the average young woman who is interested in fashion than other fashion magazines because, in spite of its upscale brand image, it features clothes from high street staples Peacock and Primark as well ass designer brands. 

2000 AD

£1.90 weekly, ABCs 20,000 approx. 

2000 AD emerged in the late 1970s, the era of punk sensibilities, when traditional children's comics were losing readers.  It is currently owned and published by Rebellion. The magazine carries very few advertisements. The genre of it is difficult to define because it has elements of a range of genres, including war, science fiction and action/adventure. 

2000 AD features five different comic shops a week, with Judge Dredd the only constant fixture, while others like Strontium Dog come and go. While each story is self-contained to an extent, the strips are serialised within each issue and often end with cliff-hangers. Characters are generally aggressive, macho, tongue-in-cheek, male and white. Settings are dark, post-apocalyptic and futuristic which links to the science fiction genre. 

While 2000 AD's peculiarly British style and humour may exclude some international audiences, it is popular in the US, Australia and New Zealand- generally in any English speaking countries. It is less widely distributed than many other comics although it can be found in larger branches of supermarkets and WH Smiths. These days, it is mostly marketed on the internet and by word of mouth, due to its peculiarly loyal and long-lived readership, although Rebellion also attends comic and film conventions.