Evaluation

Question 1: In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge the forms and conventions of a real media product?

Question 2: How does your media product represent particular social groups?

In Trend young people are represented in a positive way as the images shown in the magazine are praising the successful nature of the music artist, rather than portraying them in a negative way, for example my cover page shows the music artist looking into the camera with a slight smirk, so it creates a connection with the reader due to the eye contact and the smile has connotations of happiness, inferring he’s done something positive and good to cause him to smile. He’s wearing casual clothes which have connotations that he’s very easy going and relaxed which is appealing because he doesn’t take things too seriously. No old people are focused on in the magazine due to it being a magazine for people aged around 16-25 and not many older people are seen as appealing bar a few, so the lack of older generations is used to appeal to the younger target audience as the magazine focuses on new bands that are currently breaking out onto the music scene.

The font in which the word ‘talks’ is written in on the double page spread has connotations of misbehavior and disorder as it’s written in a graffiti-like font which usually represents misbehaving youth spray painting on walls, this is used to show that the music artist can connect to that sort of audience due to where he lives and his upbringing, rather than he participates in that behaviour himself, giving off false assumptions that he’s a misbehaving teenager when really it represents how he appeals to all social groups.

Males are represented as equal to females in Trend as the magazine focuses on all aspects of music regardless of gender, for example although there may be a male on the cover as the main feature, some articles inside may be based on female artists such as Hayley Williams and may have female music artists on the front cover in the future.

 Question 3: What kind of media institution might distribute your media product, and why?

Trend would be produced and distributed by a large magazine publishing company such as Bauer.

This company publishes other national magazine brands which would go well with Trend such as Q magazine, Kerrang! and Mojo.

 
Trend would be available for consumers to buy at these retailers: HMV, leading supermarkets such as Adsa and Tesco, Music shops and Local Newsagents across Britain.
 
It would Also have its own website which you would get a log in from subscribing to the magazine and deals and exclusive content not in the magazine upon entering the code which is in the latest edition of the magazine.

Question 4: Who will be your audience for your media product?

Question 5: How did you attract/address your audience?


I attracted my audience by making my magazine have a lot of features which were most popular when I conducted a questionnaire based on my target audience, such as the colour scheme and articles within the magazine. The choices I made for the magazine that influenced the audience are that I used neutral colour (maroon) rather than a colour predominantly associated with males (blue) or females (pink). Based on the age and other qualities of my target audience, they chose to name the magazine trend due to the relation with twitter, the genre indie, frequency of publication which was every month, the price (£2.00), articles and content and formality of the articles to be informal and more chatty. I think they chose these because my target audience is mainly males who are mainly between 18 and 21 and at the moment indie music is one of if not the most popular music genre at the moment so it's not surprising the audience wanted that as the main genre discussed in the magazine, also it's not surprising that they chose for the name to be Trend because of Twitter being in such high demand with people of my target age range they'd like to have a sense of being involved in something that's more than just a magazine. In the questionnaire the majority of feedback said they'd prefer the tone to be more informal and chatty which was expected because the age range of my target audience in this generation prefer to be less formal and they'll want to relate to the articles and the artists within the magazine as if they're talking to the people themselves rather than the same questions and articles every other magazines have. However, it is surprising that they chose the frequency of distribution to be every month because I expected them to want it to be every week so that they could keep upto date with the music they like an a more frequent bases, also it's surprising that the most commonly voted price was £2 at the highest, I would have thought they would have said the highest to be slightly higher, £3.50 for example. Overall, I attracted my audience with my magazine by including the majority of features that they said they'd like to see in the questionnaire I conducted, that way they got exactly what they wanted. The feedback group in the video said that they liked the colour scheme on all of the pages and that it wasn't too bright and in your face. They liked that I had the conventional aspect of the date, price and bar code and they thought that maybe the cover lines should have too fit the conventions by being on the side of the magazine rather than in a banner across the low half of the page. On the contents page the feedback group said they liked the way the articles and images were laid out and the colour scheme but thought that I could have done with adding more pictures, but the standard of the photography was really good. Finally the double page spread, they thought that the image addressed the audience because of the way it's not fancy, just up against the wall so overall they liked the quality of the photography used, they liked the font of the text used in the title as it was eye catching and more personal to the artist which I intended it for and they liked the informality and the personal note of the double page spread the most out of everything in article so everything I intended to address in the magazine for the audience was a success overall.

Question 6: What have you learned about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

Question 6 evaluation question from JakeMediaAS

Question 7:  Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learned in the progression from that to the full product?