Audience

In this task we have researched audiences. All media texts have an audience they are directing there material towards once the audience is find you will realise why certain media texts are presented the way they are.
Social class is an important convention used to sort out the audience for media texts. Most people are sorted into 6 groups.
A : Are the professionals and high magerial staff who often earn high salaries
B: Are middle managment and white collar workers
C1: Skilled office workers
C2: Skilled manual workers
D: are unskilled workers usually with lower salaries
E: unemployed or unskilled, students also go under this catergory.
People's social class will often have a role in what kind of media is being presented to them. It is important that media texts are directed at the right target audience, for example a magazine which advertises expensive goods and is at a high price could not be aimed at people in groups C2-E (c2,d,e). This is because they are aiming at the wrong audience so they will sell less copies. However groups C2-E generally have more magazines aimed at them, this is because these people usually have more time on their hands than groups A, B and C1 and because they make a larger percentage of the UK population. This means that media texts are more likely to be aimed at them as there is a larger audience here.When I apply social class with the school magazines I noticed that magazines from private school and grammer are of a higher quality because they are more likely to pay a professional to make the magazine this is because there audience is A and B, these parents are more likely to want to see well designed magazine so the schools will pay for this.
Other demograpghs include gender, age and lifestyle.
Magazines usually aim towards a gender this will define what kind of articles the magazine produces, the pictures inside and the cover style. Furthermore the different genders have different interests for example women may be interested in fashion more than men so magazine aimed towards women will have more fashion articles.
When making media texts they often have to look at the age they are aimed at, the age will define what style the magazine is and the style of writing used i.e teenage magazines may be less formal and use slang and magazines aimed towards older people may use less slang and be more formal. Applying this to the school magazines I noticed the magazines aimed more towards teenagers looked used more slang and informal language and the magazines aimed towards parents were more formal.
Furthermore magazines are also based on lifestyle for example, the DINKY'S and the YUPPIES. The yuppies are people who have just got their degrees or qualifications they are generally middle class or upper class, the DINKYS are double income people with no kids. DINKYS can generally afford luxuries so magazines aiming at them will be of a higher quality.