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Ownership and Profile

Ownership:

Cherry Bomb magazine is owned by Time Inc. Time Inc. was founded in New York 

in 1922, and now owns and publishes over 100 magazines including InStyle, 

People, and NME. It has a revenue of $3.1 billion and a net income of $881 million.

It's web address is http://timeinc.com/.

Cherry Bomb Magazine Profile:

Readership: 860,000

ABC2 Profile: 83%

Median Age: 19

Source: ABC September - December 2016 / NRS January - May 2017

Editorial Pillars:

Music, Art, Fashion

Reader Profile:

A Cherry Bomb reader is a woman between the ages of 17 and 21. She is likely to 

be in further education and is earning casual money to supplement her 

commodities - music, fashion, beauty items. The reader has an extendable income. 

The reader see's no sin in loving mainstream culture however she has broad (some-
times hipster) interests, she is interested in art and the way things look, therefore is 
attracted to musicians with an interesting sense of style. She sees herself as an 
individual and Cherry Bomb is a leader, not a follower of fashion.

Source: http://timeinc.com/cherry-bomb/ownership-and-profile/

Why Would One Company Wish to Own So Many Magazines?

In this post I am going to explain the reasons why a company would desire to own a range of magazines.
The first reason is increased market share. This means that the company will have more dominance over a certain topic and be able to influence a larger audience from a range of hubs. An example of a parent company whom illustrate this point are Condé Nast, an American mass media boasting of over 165 million consumers. The coorporation owns 20 magazines: Allure, Architectural Digest, Ars Technica, Bon Appétit, Brides, Condé Nast Traveler, Epicurious, Glamour, Golf Digest, GQ, The New Yorker, Pitchfork, Self, Teen Vogue, Vanity Fair, Vogue, W, Wired, Reddit and Backchannel. Of its 13 UK magazines, five are dedicate solely to fashion and they all appeal to the same kind of style. These magazines are Vogue, Tatler, Brides, CQ Style, and Vanity Fair.

The reason why I say Condé Nast is an example of increased market share, is that all their fashion magazines appeal to a similar audience who value a minimal and sophisticate style, thus Condé Nast is able to spread their fashion beliefs over Great Britain from a range of outlets. For British people because this style is being preached to us from a range of angles, it seems like this is the mainstream and in-trend style, when in actual fact it is just a style provoked by one company.

The next reason why one company may desire to own a lot of magazines is because it allows them to provide a variety of genres or topics to attract a wider audience. If we take the Bauer Media Group as an example, they create three different UK-based music magazines: Mojo, Q, and Kerrang(!).
All three magazines are based around non-popular music, out of the mainstream to attract a hipster audience. The founders of Q said that their magazine is for the "generation of older music buyers", who presumebly are not as fond of contempary pop that youths and young adults jam to, today. Mojo magazine is said to "cater for the burgeoning interest in classic rock music", which proves that this magazine also does not conform to mainstream society and the musical trends of millennials. Kerrang! brags of being "the world's biggest-selling weekly rock magazine!" showing that once again, it doesn't provide pop.
What all this means is that the Bauer Media Group manage to cater for most music enthusiasts who don't listen to conventionally pop music and this benefits them because Kerrang is able to advertise Mojo to it's alternative audience, Mojo is able to advertise Q, and Q is able to advertise Kerrang, ultimately meaning that Bauer dominates the non-pop music genre of magazines making it difficult for any other, smaller magazine to steal it's audience.
This ties in with my final point, which is smaller magazine companies will find it harder to compete with bigger magazines which benefit large organisations. An example of two magazines which provide similar content but vary a lot in popularity is Smithsonian and the National Geographic.

Smithsonian's total circulation is 1,840,077, whereas National Geographic's circulation is 6.1 million. The National Geographic is so popular and well-known for creating amazing travel and culture content that consumers do not feel the need to research into smaller magazine brands which are alike to the National Geographic, because they have the reassurance of the National Geographic's popularity.

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My magazine is inspired by magazines like i;D, Scout and Indie which promote minimalism but save their cover from being too plain with their use of vibrant colour schemes. A feature that all these magazines have is a phrase or word which describes the model or the concept of the magazine so I will aim to mimick this in my cover. These are some layouts which I have made:

The one on the bottom left is based off this album art which plays with a neat and systematic layout, mixing it with a swig of colour and a collage. I think on it's own this layout looks sort of boring however the image could make it really contempary and fun.
The other two designs are just simple and abstract designs which would allow me to do a decent amount of testing various colour schemes.
The name of my magazine will be Cherry Bomb as this is urban and sort of has an unknown connotation and meaning which makes it interesting to me. The typefact of the masterhead will either be an elegant and roman font or a soft and round font like futura or gill sans. If I opt for the roman font then the bomb will be italic so it looks like "Cherry Bomb". The colour of the masterhead will change per edition. These are my examples:

(Secondary photography)

What is succesful about the first one is that it looks contempary and stylish, however what is not as good about this one is that it looks identical to the cover of i;D magazine, and so it looks like a copy.

What is succesful about the bottom left one is that it looks chic because of the repetition of the cherry pink colour from picture to font, what is not succesful is that the coverlines don't sieze the reader's attention.

What is succesful about the final one is that the colours are pleasing to the eye and also it looks interesting and unlike any other magazine cover. Therefore I will use this template.

Production Log

Click on boxes to be referred to referenced posts

Item	Date started	Date completed
Magazine case study  Analysing an entire magazine developed my understanding of colour and genres further, and additionally when I analysed the actual text of the magazine I learnt how magazines can advocate their beliefs and morals and how to influence an audience with words and photography.	09/11/16	19/12/16
Analysis of magazine front covers Analysing the front covers of magazines taught me a lot about representations and how big a part coverlines and colours play in constructing these representations. I also learnt to understand that magazines are aiming to communicate something with their pieces and these concepts also build representations. 1.  2.  3.	1. 08/09/16 2. 14/09/16 3. 12/12/16	1. 9/09/16 2. 21/09/16 3. 16/12/16
Analysis of colour and connotations  As I said before I learnt that colour helps the magazine create representations and play with stereotypes. I also found that certain colour schemes can connotate different things such as red and black indiciate sexualness and pink and white indicated fragility.	17/01/17	19/01/17
Analysis of a magazine contents page From analysing the contents page I learnt how useful synonymous phrases or words are for demonstrating a concept to an audience. I also looked at layouts and colours, and what I discovered from this is a neat and geometric layout is much nicer to read (in my opinion,) because it's easy to read and aesthetically pleasing. 1.  2.	1. 27/09/16 2. 09/11/16	1. 28/09/16 2. 10/11/16
Analysis of a magazine article 1. For task two of my post about emotive and colloquial language I analysed magazine articles and I studied the effect of specific word choices on the reader and what kind of vibe the journalist is trying to communicate. 2. In this task I again analysed language and I also learnt about how journalists can set a style or mood for their text, i.e the techniques journalists use to write in an informative style or descriptive story style.	1. 20/12/16 2. 09/11/16	1. 23/12/16 2. 19/12/16
Magazine ownership and parent companies  1. My post about why parent companies strive to own a range of magazines taught me that magazines aim to dominate a certain topic and this post also allowed me to look at magazine genres and how they peach their opinions onto consumers. 2. In my ownership and profile post I learnt what the ABC profile is.	1. 28/01/17 2. 29/01/17	1. 29/01/17 2. 29/01/17
Planning the magazine  From this post I combined everything I had learnt about colour and representations and appearences and I solidified my study by putting my knowledge into action and planning my draft for my magazine. 1.  2.	1. 27/01/17 2. 30/01/17	1. 27/01/17 2. 30/01/17
Draft of magazine In the same post as the planning post I made the draft which allowed me to prove my knowledge and also decide which concept I preffered for my final magazine cover.	27/01/17	27/01/17
Photo analysis  The photo analysis furtherened my experimentation with different mediums as  I used blogger, jpeg's, imovie, quicktime player and youtube to display all the information I had.	17/03/17	23/03/17
Final magazine From making the entire magazine, I learned how to use adobe photoshop, I learnt how many edit's go into the final production, and I learned that every single detail has to have a reason or connotation.	1/02/17	22/03/17
Overall evaluation	23/03/17	31/03/17

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Colours in Magazines

Task 1:

This magazine has five main colours, pink, blue, white, black and yellow. Of these four, pink and blue are the most attention grabbing colours. Pink can be connotated with lipstick, flowers and femininity, and the shade of pink that Dolly magazine has used is bubblegum pink so there’s also the resemblance to bubble gum. Blue can be connotated with the ocean and sky, sapphires and various birds. I reckon that Dolly's target audience are young, impressionable, teens. The shades of blue and pink are very light and sweet like confectionary so I think the hues appeal to the audience as they resemble gummy bears and sweets like that, which teenagers and children have a tendency to like.

The main colours on this cover is black, red, and white. Black is connotated with dangerous things like death and smoke. Paradoxly, white is connotated with pure things like heaven, clouds, and light. When black and white are put together they create a classy facade and they look minimal and sophisticated yet stylish, however I think this magazine is playing with that concept. Avril Lavigne's makeup and clothing is messy and gothic so it doesn't particularly seem classy to me. Then, they add red which is connotated with risky and dangerous things, as well as sexual things. Red is seen as risky because of driving-danger signs and fire, but it also seen as sexy because of lipstick and lingerie. Normally when magazines have a red-white-black theme, they are using the lustful representation of red however here I think they are using both implications. The red seems sort of risky because of Lavigne's edgy eyeshadow and bralet, but it also seems sexy because words like "sex", "balls", and "bad girl" are highlighted in red, and these are words with provocative connotations.

The main colours in this cover are black, blue, pink, white, and flesh (if that is a colour…). Apart from black, all the colours are pastel shades and light hues can be connotated with spring, sweets and flowers, and so I think the main cover image can be perceived as fruity and fresh. As I mentioned when analysing the previous cover, black is connotated with dangerous things but I think that because W has used such an elegant, chic, and vintage font and also because there are so many other light and soft colours, here the black doesn't seem dangerous and instead it just seems classic or modish.

Task 2:

If I was to produce a cover for an indie-rock themed magazine this would be my colour palette. I've chosen them because I've seen many indie and grunge fashion and musical icons supporting these colours, such as popular Instagram and web blogger Le-Happy who has been supporting red hair for a matter of years or the popular yellow smiley-face emblem for the band, Nirvana. My favourite thing surrounding grunge style is that bold and bright colours are taken and dulled down so that they don't grab lots of attention yet easily compliment each other, so when making this palette I chose a vibrant red, yellow, and green, and then kept darkening the original colour. I have chosen a charcoal shade appose to black which is the pinnacle dark colour because although black is technically the absence of colour, I think that it's still to bold and captivating and I wanted something mellow.

I designed this cover based around this colour palette. I chose to make the background charcoal because this will make the other colours seem bright and pop off, whilst still allowing them to look mellow. I made the tagline and issue date reds because red accompanies yellow better than green. I chose to make the masterhead yellow because it's the brightest and happiest colour, so it refines the cover from looking obsessively dull and gothic. I made the coverlines green as they were the final colours in my palette to use.

This colour scheme was prompted by a fashion and beauty magazine for women, with emphasis moreso on beauty than fashion. I chose a range of pink tones because pink is stereotypically the colour favoured by women and also pink is a common colour for makeup with pink blushes and lipsticks being very common. 

This is another cover I designed based off this palette: Because the shades are monochromatic, my choices were unplanned and more so experimental.

Emotive and Colloquial Language in Magazines

The article which I am going to analyse is titled "the best albums of 2016" and on the Time Out London magazine website, it is a mixture of reviews of different pop albums. Link: [x]

This critic explains that band, Radiohead, have not released an album in "yonks". Yonks (meaning 'in a long time') is colloquial language with the origin of Britain. Although it's not know in which region of Britain the word was first born, it is known to be from the 1960s and it is theorised to brew from the saying "in donkey years". James Manning continues to explain that the album was "inspired by the end of Thom Yorke's 23-year relationship". This is emotive pathos as the concept of ending a relationship which has lasted as long as 23 years easily makes the audience upset, as we can reminisce relationships we have had with friends, family, and partners, ending. When I read "heartbreaking", I thought of loads of situations where someone is quite obviously heart-broken, like someone crying or having a panic attack or someone just being completely emotionally numb, and for me thinking of all these things that are connotated with the word made me sad.

This critic, Kate Lloyd continuously used emotive language through her column where she describes the "manic" album, 'My Women' by Angel Olsen. She describes the record as one "to be miserable to". This is emotive language because the audience can identify with the notion of feeling down and listening to down music and doing nothing else. And because the audience can assimilate with this, it's quite sad to read because it reminds us of when we have been sad. The words 'sulky' and 'angsty' are also emotive words because unlike other emotions like sad and angry, these words are very specific and like the previous sentence they remind us of when we felt these ways. Lloyd says that the album illustrates "a troubling picture of love". Because love is practically always shed in a positive light,  I think this statement catches the audience off guard and reminds the vulnerable members about the damage that love can make.

James Manning, who I analysed earlier, again used colloquial language when describing Iggy Pop's album 'Post Pop Depression'. Manning exclaimed "who'd have though Iggy would outlive his old mucker Dave". Here he is addressing Iggy Pop's good and passed away companion, David Bowie. 'Mucker' is a word used in middle England and it is slang for friend.

Q. Why do magazines use colloquial language?

Magazines which are more article based than pictorial like the Guardian use colloquial language because this informality makes it seem like the journalist is writing to their friend, the magazine's occupier. Taking the article on the right as an example, "Why the Internet Loves Cats - Not Dogs", the writer Jack Shepherd tells us that he embraces "feline overlords". This informality is funny and sarcastic, and it seems like common banter between two pals which attracts the audience. Another example is when he tells us that "the cat propaganda machine is ruthlessly effective". Obviously Shepherd is not being literal however it does engage the audience by proposing that cats have a publicity machine. Another useful aspect towards colloquial language is that it sets the mood for the piece. Going back to this extract, Shepherd tells us that "media is almost completely under the sway of the powerful cat lobby". The subtle informality and humour sets an upbeat and cheery tempo, which is a positive thing to read thus attracting more customers.

A feature which is really popular in modern day is multi-modal language (e.g "nvm" - nevermind, "lol" - laugh out loud) and puncuation (emoticons like :) and (≧∇≦)/, and symbols like #, @, etc). These serve a similar purpose to colloquial language in that they make the text seem more personal and informal. This journalist uses multi-modal punctuation as he hashtags, "#AskAlan". This hashtag is effective as it seems modern and contemporary and a hashtag is an ordinary concept within youth culture, which is effective as it corresponds with the target audience of young adults. The journalist continues to say "I like his all-around game and his swagger". Swagger is colliqual language as it's a friendly and slang adjective meaning 'fashionable' or 'trendy', originating for Britain. By mentioning a word which the reader would probably use, the text seems more familiar and personal.
In conclusion, colliqual language is appreciated in magazines because it spews a sense of familiarality and friendship between the writer and the reader. It does this because ordinary people use these words in everyday speech and therefore we, the audience, recognise this dialect as how we would speak to our friends.

Task: Create coverlines for a target audience using emotive and colliqual language.

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