Myles' Blog

Below is the link attached for my presentation created on Prezi:  https://prezi.com/view/zZeap6fLpSoYEphWAQR1/

In this blog I looked into target audience in magazine. In this blog I looked at the difference between demographics and psychographics, giving examples for both. In this blog i also researched and explained why target audiences are useful to magazine companies. I followed up this blog with another blog diving deeper into particular magazines and their target audience, which further expanded my knowledge of this topic. Producing this blog helped me gain a better understanding on what makes up a target audience and knowing whats important to look into when finding your target audience.

In this blog I looked into the future of magazines. I found doing this blog useful because I learnt about the certain aspects of magazine publishing that companies have to take into concideration such as innovating their magazines to match the changes in technology. I also looked into a particular magazine 'GQ France' and used them as an example of innovation taking place. I think I could have improved this blog by going into more detail with the magazine companies I used as examples.

In this blog, I discovered the readerships of magazines across the world and more specifically in the uk. What I discovered is the magazines with the most readerships are not magazines you would expect, such as India Today as it is not as well known by other countries. I found this topic useful as it gives me an idea of what makes magazines so popular. I could have improved this blog by diving deeper into the readerships such as by giving the stats of how many people read each magazine. I also could have targeted other countries readerships.

In this blog I analysed the codes and conventions of a set genre of magazine. In this blog the magazine I chose was Men's Health, meaning the genre was based upon fitness and wellbeing, more specifically for men. I found doing this blog extremely useful and interesting becuase it is the genre I ispire to do for my own magazine. I looked deeply into the conventions of this magazine. To imrpove in this blog, I could have added zoomed in pictures of the magazine to add more detail to my explinations.

In today’s lesson we dived deeper into the use of connotations. As a group we were given a magazine front cover and were told to connotate the magazine as much as possible. As a group we brainstormed some good ideas, however there was more that we didn’t spot. With the help of Mrs McClelland we dived deeper into the meanings and ideas of the connotations. For example, we dissected the main image and analysed in particular the use of direct address. I found this lesson particularly useful and will use my increase of knowledge to analyse magazines better in future blogs.

The use of semiotics has allowed me to have a much greater understanding of the ways media present themes, particularly within magazines. I have learnt about different colours and understand what they represent with the use and understanding of the colour emotion guide. I also had help understanding this topic with the use of Barthes’ understanding of the myth which is the notion of a socially constructed reality which is passed off as ‘natural’.

  The magazine I have chosen to analyse the use of semiotics is the magazine, Men’s Health. I have chosen this magazine because it strikes my personal interests and the magazine takes advantage of semiotics well. At first glance of the magazine, you notice the Masthead. Men’s Health is well known for using a strong red colour, matched with a bold but simple font. The use of the colour red could represent several different meanings, this could be anger, war, blood and determination or could be sexual, happy, motivated or love. With the use of the bold font, it further supports the idea anger and determination rather than love. Men’s Health put a lot of focus towards the main image of there magazines. They typically use a mid-shot image, in order in this instance to show off the physical features of the model. If we dive deeper into the image itself, the model is almost always seen topless, revealing muscles and potentially tattoos or a tan. This suggests masculinity which suppor...

In this blog I learnt about media industries and ownership. I went into a fair amount of detail in this blog and included pictures of the examples given. In the texts I included examples in magazine to support my understanding of magazines for the future. I found conglomerates the most interesting because it makes you realise how many small companies are owned by one large media comapny. It gives you an indicaton of how much power these large media companies have. I could improve my blog by adding the idea of a family tree to give the example of vertical and horizonal intergration in magazine