13th December 2010 - Deconstruction of magazine's content

Last lesson (13/12/2010), we were asked to deconstruct the magazine to find out what different kind of features were published, and if they were a regular thing.

Objective

• List the different kinds of features, reports and articles.
• What regular features can you identify, letters page, letter from editor, reviews etc.
• How is the language used throughout the magazine appropriate for the target audience? Find specific examples to support your answer
• What presumptions are institutions making about their audience? Eg. Young adults use expletives in regular conversations not shocked by it.

As my magazine is a music magazine (NME), most of the contents would be published in each magazine. For example,

• Track of the Week
• Top 20 NME Chart
• Fanmail
• Gig Dates
• Gig Guides

However there were things that wouldn't be in every week, such as personal interviews with certain stars, storys about up and coming artists and top artists etc.

Whilst going through the magazine, there is language used that you wouldn't see in most magazines, language that some people would find offensive. However the target audience to the magazine use this language day to day and would not see the language as inappropriate.

Introduction...

For my Foundation Portfolio I will be creating...

• Front cover to a music magazine
• A contents page for the music magazine
• A double-paged spread for the music magazine

To date, I have done a preliminary task in which we had to create a front cover for a School Magazine and design a front cover for it too. We also made a questionnaire to find out what our target audience wanted to see in the magazine, this would give us an idea on how we should create it.

I have also deconstructed front covers of music magazines, we did this to find out what sort of things are on different genres of music magazines, as they can vary. I have also identified the target audience by analyising adverts in the magazine.

Next steps...

• To deconstruct the contents page