Importance of Audience Feedback

In creating magazines and in turn my own magazine, audience feedback is vital, the majority of my magazine was based on feedback I gained from audiences. For example the genre I based my magazine on was decided by a survey I conducted through a number of people at both a rock gig and a bounce/rave night, I conducted a survey at both of these as to not get a biased opinion.

I did quite a few drafts of different examples of my magazine and asking classmates and other people for feedback on each draft helped make my magazine become better and better, for example I created a number of different mastheads for my magazine and asked classmates and my tutor which they thought looked better and would suit the genre of my magazine.

Asking for feedback from an audience was important in creating my magazine as I got more than just my own view. Looking back if I had just left aspects of my magazine like how I thought looked the best I would have created one that didn’t look professional; an example of this is my preliminary double page spread, at first I was going to drag across most of the design for this in my final double page spread, however a few classmates told me that it didn’t look that real, therefore I completely redesigned it and kept on asking for feedback as I made progress with it.

Voice Evaluation

I recoreded myself talking about hwat I have learned throughout my course and have use Windows Movie Maker to format my audio track and upload it onto my blog.

IPC and Bauer Essay.

Bauer

· The Bauer Publishing Group was founded in Hamburg 1875 by Johann Bauer.
· The Bauer Publishing Group has grown from its humble beginnings as a printing house into a worldwide publishing empire comprising 282 magazines in 15 countries with 6,600 employee’s worldwide and annual turnover of 1.79 billion Euros.
· Bauer entered the U.K. scene with Bella magazine in 1987
· 1990 Take a Break has maintained its no.1 status, currently selling over 1 million copies a week.
· Magazines include: Grazia, More, Heat, Take a Break, FHM, Zoo, Kerrang!, Mojo, Q, TV Choice
· Subgenres: – All of these magazines tend to be around £1.90-£3.00
· Magazines such as Q are often aimed at mainstream audiences whilst magazines such as The Angling Times cater for more of a niche audience; this is because these types of magazines appeal to a specific audience whereas mainstream magazines appeal to more of a wider audience.
· Kerrang!
- Kerrang! was the first niche music magazine in the UK, it started off as a free supplement first in a mainstream magazine called sounds. Appeals to more of a niche audience because it is specifically a rock magazine aimed at people that like rock music. ‘Individually minded, independent of thought and musically experienced, an audience defined by attitude, passion and loyalty’. Kerrang! Aims more at a male audience and appeals to them by using content such as hard rock/metal iconic males on the front cover pulling angry faces or violent expressions. The edgy and underground style appeals to rock readers and draws in their audiences.
Circulation - 52,2762 (-32.1%) - Percentage change year on year… KERRANG! remains the market-leading music weekly with a devoted audience of rock fans driving sales of 52,272 with a strong online, TV and Radio presence. KERRANG! remains a flagship 360 brand recently hosting a sell-out 16 date tour of the UK. (2008)
- Synergy – Bauer also own Kerrang! Radio and Kerrang! TV and use these channels to promote Kerrang! Magazine, this is an example of cross media ownership in order to promote their products. Also, Bauer own Q magazine and Mojo and often advertise subscriptions for Kerrang! Magazine, this is another example of synergy. Award ceremony. Kerrang! Tour. Sponsors download festival – free copy of Kerrang! Interview, radio, TV. Interviews shared between magazines. Advertise Kerrang! On ‘The Box’ channel.
· Q
- ‘Open minded experience seekers, the Q audience don’t define themselves by the music they listen to. Music is an important passion, but their love of music will never be to the detriment of their other passions, such as film, sport and comedy.’ Q appeals to more of a mainstream audience because it doesn’t contain one specific genre of music. It appeals to its audience of music lovers by always portraying artists that are currently popular or in the charts. For example, the latest copy had Lily Allen on the front cover.











- 10000000 – Percentage change year on year. biggest monthly music title. retains its pre-eminent position as the number one music monthly brand in the UK and across Europe with a circulation of 103,017. …A striking and comprehensive redesign in October brought new editorial content, columnists, photographers and world exclusive interviews with U2, AC/DC and the Kings of Leon. This new content has complimented the rest of Q’s digital offering - such as qthemusic.com, Q’s music TV station and Q Radio.
- Synergy – Q radio or Q TV, cross media ownership can also be used by advertising in other magazines such as Mojo or other TV channels such as Kerrang. Also radio and be used to promote different products. Award ceremony. Partly sponsors Glastonbury.
IPC Media
· IPC Media is a leading UK consumer magazine publisher. Almost two in every three UK women and over 44% of UK men read an IPC magazine. That's over 26 million UK adults.
· IPC is owned by Time Inc., the publishing division of Time Warner Inc. Our business is split into five distinct publishing divisions: IPC Connect, IPC Inspire, IPC Ignite, IPC Southbank and IPC TX. Alongside these is Marketforce, the UK's leading magazine distribution business. IPC employs over 2,200 people, and it's their creativity, innovation, talent and commitment that drives our market-leading position in UK consumer publishing.
· 80 magazines
· NME, Look, Nuts, Marie Claire, Pick Me Up
NME
· New musical express
· First issue in 1952. First British newspaper to include a singles chart. Changed to magazine in 1970
· Weekly, music tabloid
NME is a British weekly music magazine. Featuring agenda-setting news, the UK's most comprehensive gig guide, definitive reviews of the week's hottest gigs, tracks and albums, and fiery comment from the nation's most opinionated writers, it's the essential guide to the week in music.
Arctic Monkeys, The Smiths, Klaxons and Oasis were all introduced to the world via the pages of NME, while in recent months we've given Pete Doherty a lift home from prison in our car, inadvertently made Noel Fielding cry in the middle of an interview, and rounded up the artists moving music forward in 2008 in our special Future 50 issue.
NME comes out every Wednesday, is priced £2.20 and is available in all good newsagents.
· Circulation 2446
· Readership 56,786
· Audience – Punk rockers, “NME's audiences are fast-moving music fans who live at the cutting edge of media culture and media development. As such it's vital the NME continues to develop with them and produce the magazine that's completely right for the time. This refresh allows us to further focus on the content of the paper our readers love most as well as introduce a fresh, clean design that shows off the best of NME's iconic photography and music journalism.”
· Mainstream
· Appeals to audiences by including up to date popular artists and gossip.
· Synergy – NME radio, NME TV, NME Album of the year, NME awards tour. NME new noise tour.
· In May 2006, an IPC press release claimed: 'The NME is the biggest-selling and most respected music weekly in the world. Every week it gives its readers the most exciting, wittiest, most authoritative coverage of the very best in music.'

Evaluation

This is my evaluation to upload to blogger I had to copy my work from Word into Publisher to save it as a picture file and then upload.

Final Doublepage Spread

Here is my final doublepage spread created using Quark Xpress, I uploaded it onto blogger using Adobe Photoshop 5.

Final magazine ideas

Here is my final decision on the magazine I want to create, after asking around the class and my tutor and parents I came to this conclucion.

Appendix 5 Plan

Here is my first plans I made for the creation of my final magazine.

Production Log

Here is my production log, I planned ahead what I planned to do in my free time and in the media studies lessons I had 2 weeks before the end.

Draft of Contents

Here is my double page spread so far, after a few minor touches and my photo it will be complete, as with my contents I used Quark Xpress to create it. I had a little trouble turning it into a Jpeg as I had to work around on Adobe Photoshop5 to be able to upload it as a landscape image.

Final Contents page

Here is my final contents page; I created it using Quark Xpress, and brought generic elements from other magazines of the same genre such as Kerrang!

Appendix 5

This magazine is going to be a mainstream, indie/rock magazine. The audience I will target the magazine at will be males and females aged 16-40.

The title of the magazine is going to be one of two words, Trigger or Influx. The connotations of these words are the main reason I used them. A trigger is used to activate a firearm and is an extremely important part of the machine; this fits well as Indie is also an important part of the musical scene now and is triggering many new bands which aren’t manufactured to come out of the woodwork.

Influx is the more likely name I will choose as its synonyms are words such as wave, and Indie or my magazine is now a big wave hitting the shores. I also wanted to use Influx as I believe I could make the word into a visually attractive and recognizable masthead.

My ideas for this magazines front cover image are a group of people, or one person alone. They will be dressed in clothing such as waistcoats, ties and trousers to comply with the stereotypical representation of Indie bands / singers. Facial expressions will be serious and may look slightly down on the reader to appear aloof and important. This mis-en-scene will allow the audience to instantly recognize what type of magazine mine will be. The background will be a plain white canvas or a picture of the sky, am image of a sun will be in one of the corners. The sky background could connote that the band is high up in social status.

The splash article will be about an upcoming band called VolumeZero; I will go into detail about their past, gigs they’ve played before coming into the spotlight and details about the members.

Contents Picture.

Here is a picture I am going to cut out to use in my contents page.