magazine sketch 1

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.

Audience Research

Research is an important part in making a media text, you must have an idea of who your target audience are and what they want from a media text. This is why many different techniques are used in order to get enough information when creating media text for example magazines.
After doing research on the different types of research used these are the main ones I have found:

• Primary research: gathering information yourself, this can be through doing questionnaires and surveys, interviews, focus group etc. The main benefits to primary research is that it's your own research so you can tailor the questions to make them suitable on what you want to find out, it's also inexpensive and you can get as much information as you want. However drawbacks to primary research are the fact it is time consuming when it comes to turning the research into data or sorting it out as well as this issue finding suitable people to interview etc. can be difficult and this can cause a problem because making sure you have the right type of people is important if you want to collect good data and information.
• Secondary research: looking through someone else's research this can be by looking at other magazines, newspapers, websites etc it can also be looking at previous data from previous questionnaires and applying them to yourself. These is beneficial because it can help you gather alot of different information as information is already out there, this can also be less time consuming in contrast to going out and collecting data yourself. However finding information from other peoples work isn't always reliable as it may be irrelevant data. For example if your doing a primary school magazine research secondary school magazines would provide you with some information that is irrelevant because the target audiences are different. Furthermore using secondary research makes you reliant on other peoples research and statistics which may not be accurate. 

Within Secondary and Primary research I found that there were different ways to obtain information.
The main ways I researched:
Focus groups
Questionnaires
Online Surveys
Interview

These will all help me get my primary research done.
Focus groups usually involve getting a small number of people and asking them questions within that group, these are usually open questions which will allow me to ask more questions and allow my respondent(s) to open up on their thoughts and feelings, which may provide me with qualitative data. Interviews are similar but usually involve questioning one person. Both ways are often take a long time but they allow you to get a lot of qualitative data and opinions.
Online Surveys, I have the option of putting an online survey on my blog. This is similar to a questionnaire however it is often much shorter (usually one question) and it is better for collecting quantitative data as closed questions are usually asked. I think online surveys are useful as they can help me get a variety of respondents i.e different parts of the country.
Questionnaires are can be used to get qualitative or quantitative data. Usually you have a list of questions and you get as many people as you can to fill them in, these can be a mixture of open or closed questions.

What is the difference between qualitative and quantitative data?
Qualitative data usually involves answers and opinions.
Qualitative data can be put into figures that can be turned into pie charts and graphs etc.

What is the difference between an open and closed question?
Open questions are usually questions that require to the respondent to put more thought into their answer often they will be able to include their opinions and more information about themselves.
Closed questions are usually yes or no questions or have boxes if it is multiple choice. Closed questions are often easier to turn into data.

How has this research helped me? 
After  doing this research i have found different ways to collect data for my magazine which will help me. I will be doing mostly primary research because there isn't much infomation on school magazines out there already.

Content page analysis



Magazine Conventions

For our first media task I have been looking at magazine conventions this is because I will be making my own magazine. I looked at 3 magazine covers for school magazine. This was a hard task as there are not many ACTUAL school magazines. Most magazine covers that I had found had been made by other media students so they were not as professional, this is because they have been made on lower budgets and as media students we don't often have a lot of experiance making magazine covers. Furthermore there is a decrease in the amount of real school magazines made in general, this is because magazines cost a lot to produce and because they don't have a large target audience or market. Most school magazines are usually made by ICT staff or the reception and have a low distrubution rate. Also because of technology people now go online to look at articles and magazines an example of this happening is with the Gaurdian newspaper which has a large online market. Taking all of this into consideration I still noticed some similiar traits in all three magazine covers I analysed. For example all three have large mastheads which are placed at the top of the magazine cover, these mastheads are often eye catching and bright and are in fonts which differ to the font used for the coverlines to make them more bold. All of the magazines had coverlines which is a convention used internationally, this is important as the coverlines often tell us what the magazine is going to be about. Furthermore they all have images which feature people, the photos are often taken in a half body shot and have a vivid high saturation shot used on the magazine cover. This makes the magazines stand out and seem more appealing. Traditionally white or red is used in masthead as it is eye catching however one fo the magazine covers didn't not follow this convention. I thought this magazine did not look as professional as the others. I also noticed the professional magazines followed conventions more and the rule of Z.

Below are the magazines I have analysed:

 

 

 

 

Introduction

Hello my name is Ade Aiyedun and this is my AS media blog we will be learning about Media conventions, and magazine layouts because eventually we will be making our own school magazines and then a music magazine.