Alex Dagg AS Media Blog: 2013

Original Ideas Statement

Original ideas statement

My original idea was to create a magazine with a target audience of mainly males in an age range of 16 to late 20’s. The genre my magazine would focus on would be a variation of punk, pop punk, punk rock and hardcore music targeting the niche social group associated with that genre, as it is growing rapidly and there is a gap in the market for a magazine for that genre, there are existing magazines focusing on metal, rock and metalcore genres etc, however a purely punk and hardcore magazine is not yet available, it’s layout would not be messy and trashy like typical existing rock genre magazines, it would be tidy and clean although having many images for the readers there would still be a lot of features and text as to not make it a solely image based magazine. I want to have a dark colour scheme and house style consisting of blacks whites and greys and one other colour to add the feel I’m looking for to the magazine. I will create a fictional hardcore band for the main feature in my magazine and write about the attitudes within the genre in order to connect with and relate to the readers.

Location, Props and Costume.

Location, props and costume

The images I used in my magazine were photographs I took in two locations, the first location I used was the photo studio at the college, the photos that were taken there are the photo’s in the photo reel along the bottom of my feature article and the image next to the editor’s note. The second location I used was my house, outside it (contents image, front cover image, and small image in feature article) and one photo inside it (main feature article image). I used many props in my images, such as bottles, bin lids, telephones, a fake hand and a prop gun in the photos from the photo studio and in the photos taken at home 2 guitars and 2 cigarettes were used as props. I also used many costumes in my photos from the studio to make them as ‘random’ and ‘unique’ as possible, the costumes I used in my photos from the studio were a cowboy hat and scarf, a blazer and builders hat, a karate gi with a scarf and a beanie hat and a bowler hat with a pot on the head, a tweed blazer, a pink t-shirt and a bin lid, a denim gilet with a cowboy hat and scarf over the face, and a Santa suit with a monster mask and a matching glove.

Publishers and Information

Publishers

A publisher is a company who are in charge of printing and distributing magazines, you can publish a magazine independently, which has both advantages and disadvantages such as main publishers already have contracts with big stores or high street chains such as WHSmiths, however if your magazine was published by a large publisher you may lose some editorial control over your magazine, it is also possible that they could just stop publishing your magazine if it didn’t meet their sales targets.

Bauer Media is a division of the Bauer Media Group, Europe’s largest privately owned publishing Group. The Group is a worldwide media empire offering over 300 magazines in 15 countries, as well as online, TV and radio stations. Bauer media group’s magazine most similar to the one I have created is ‘Kerrang’ magazine, although the features of Kerrang are different in many ways to my own magazine, I think there are too many similarities in target audience and some genres that it would not be beneficial if Bauer were to publish my magazine.

IPC Media (formerly International Publishing Corporation), a wholly owned subsidiary of Time Inc., is a consumer magazine and digital publisher in the United Kingdom, with a large portfolio selling over 350 million copies each year. The top selling music magazine the IPC publish is ‘NME’ which focuses on indie and rock genre’s this means that I could sell my magazine to this publisher as a rival, competing magazine against Bauer’s ‘Kerrang’ magazine.

Future plc is an international media group, listed on the London Stock Exchange (symbol: FUTR). Founded in 1985 with one magazine, today they have operations in the UK, US and Australia creating over 200 specialist publications, apps, websites and events. In terms of magazines intertextual to my own or at least with similarities, future plc are the publishers of the magazine ‘Metal Hammer’ which focuses of metal and rock genres, so like Bauer, my magazine would not be of much benefit to the publisher if they were to publish it.

Overview of magazine industry in the UK

The magazine industry is a huge industry in today’s media and has been a huge industry for many years. Magazine’s jobs are primarily to inform and entertain, but they can also be used for readers to relate to or use as a way to escape from their everyday lives and just get their heads deep in a good magazine. There are over 8000 titles published in Britain which can be categorised in 7 ways:

1. Consumer (general and specialist) – sold in newsagents and online

2. Business / trade / professional / B2B – for people at work

3. Customer magazines that organisations give to their customers as a form of marketing

4. Staff magazines to inform staff about their company

5. Newspaper supplements – come free as part of our daily or Sunday paper.

6. Part works – a set number of issues builds up into an ‘encyclopaedia’ on a specific topic.

7. Academic journals – for university-level discussion of all sorts of arcane topics

Consumer titles make up the majority of the titles sold in newsagents and are probably the most selling and widely available type of magazine currently available in the UK.

Facts from today in the UK

. There are over 3,200 different consumer titles (in 1980 there were only 1,383)

. 1.4 billion Magazines are sold each year (it was 2.1 billion in 1970 and 1.2 billion in 1992)

. 85% of the population reads a magazine

. Advertisers spent £745 million in magazines (in 2008)

. Consumers spend £2 billion on magazines annually

. An average of 500 new magazines have been launched every year in the past decade

. Only 3 in 10 titles survive for more than 4 years

The biggest consumer magazine publishers (by 2008 sales revenue in newsagents:

1. Bauer (Bauer Publishing): 25%

2. IPC (Time Warner): 20%

3. BBC Magazines (BBC): 7.8%

4. National Magazines (Hearst): 7.3%

Although the magazine industry is currently flourishing there are theories that the media format of the magazine may change in the near future and the industry with it. A lot of companies and publishers see the ‘app revolution’ working in their favour as more and more people can download magazines digitally and read them on a number of different media devices. This has advantages such as the money saved by the companies printing and distributing costs being cut out but is a disadvantage to a lot of newsagents who will lose money the more people use apps to download magazines.

To conclude, the magazine industry is standing strong currently making billions of pounds each year, but there is question of it being under threat or even improving due to the ‘app revolution’.