Media Evaluation

1. Evaluation
By Johnny Hill

2. 1. What ways does your media product use, develop or
challenge forms and conventions of real media
products?
For my initial research I began to look at other popular music magazines that are
already on the market and see how and why they are so successful. I then did some
market research by analysing the front covers, double page spread and contents pages
of each magazine so that this would give me a good idea into what I had to include
when making my own.

3. • The magazines I chose were: Kerrang!, Q and Mojo. Which gave me a better
understanding as to how these magazines are laid out and what works well. Such
as the use of columns, cover lines, mastheads, straplines and pull quotes. One of
the conventions I followed when designing my front cover was to put the
masthead at the top of the magazine. This is done by magazines so that when they
are stored in the shop you can identify which magazine is which without having to
pick it up. I also put the masthead in bold black capitals as I feel this is also quite
common amongst popular magazines today. I feel this is so that there is no
confusion to potential buyers about which magazine they are picking up .

4. In addition, another convention that I went with was the limited colour palette for the
front cover and contents page. The majority of music magazines have a very small
colour range on the front cover, mostly consisting of 3 or 4 colours. For my front cover
in particular I decided to stick with just black and white as I feel it went with the
subject in the front cover as he was in black and white too. Id had a look at other
magazines that had done the same and thought it worked really well.

5. 2. How does your media product
represent particular social groups?
The images I have included in my magazine all have different representations of social
groups that are linked with my magazine. Whether it is to do with the gender,
ethnicity, age or their style of clothes, they each have their own meaning as to what
that says about them in society.

6. The genre of music that my magazine portrays is indie rock bands who are up and
coming, the model for my front cover is a white male which is quite conventional for
indie bands today. This was unintentional and done because the location we were
taking photos in was mostly Caucasian centered.

7. 3. What kind of Media institution
might distribute your media product
and why?
There is more than one factor when deciding on a media institution to distribute your
magazine. You could find a gap in the market by getting it published by an institution
that has never published a magazine like yours before. Or you could go with a
publisher who specializes in your type of magazine and therefore know how to
distribute it well and in turn get more sales from it. Personally I want to go with a
publisher who’s expertise lie in music magazines because I feel that it would be too
much of a risk putting in the hands of an institution that has limited knowledge on the
product their selling.

8. The publisher I would use to distribute my magazine would be
IPC Media, because they are a very well known and highly
respected institution that deals with music magazines constantly.
For example NME are published by IPC Media, so I feel that
people who read NME are the kind of people that would take an
interest in my magazine. As IPC are so well known I feel that my
magazine would easily take off because people wont believe that
IPC would ever publish a bad magazine so people will be more
incline to buy it. With its parent company being Time Inc. UK,
which was founded in 1968 so you know that these people are
specialists in their field of work and have been around a long
time to know what works well and what doesnt

9. The only problem being is that because IPC Media already have
such a successful music magazine such as NME out there, that
they wont feel the need to publish my magazine. On the other
hand they do publish the magazine but it then in turn reduces
the sales in the already well established music magazine.

10. 4. Who would be your audience for
your media product?
To find out what audience I wanted I carried out interviews and surveys so
that it would further my knowledge on what type of people I am aiming for
and to also get an idea of what people actually like in a magazine so that I can
refine mine exactly to what the majority want.

11. In my survey I asked them a series of basic questions just to get a full
understanding of what I needed to include when making my magazine. For
example questions like “what’s your age?”, this is so I know how young or old
my target audience is going to be which I can then base my magazine around
that. Another question: “what genre of music do you listen to?”, this is an
essential question to find out what kind of music I will be including in my
magazine so that when it goes on sale I know that there will already be
buyers. Also: “What music magazines have you previously bought?”. I felt
this was a good question to ask so that I could see which magazines are
popular amongst certain age groups and therefore I can do further research
into a particular magazine and take ideas from them.

12. 5. How did you attract/address your
audience?
Again, the information that I gathered from the surveys and interview helped
me refine what my audience would like to see in a magazine. Therefore if I
made note of what the majority would like from a music magazine I could
almost tailor it to suit everyone's needs.

13. I wanted to make my magazine quite cheap and affordable but still have
quality content. I realised that from my survey results that the majority of the
people answering were within the 15-24 age range, this tells me that these
are most likely students or young adults just starting full time employment
who are people that don’t have a huge income if any. So I didn’t want to make
the price of the magazine so expensive that they’d be put off but still high
enough that it would be worth making. One of the statements in my survey
was “The cost of magazines nowadays is reasonable” and they simply had to
agree, disagree or say they weren't sure. Nearly a third of people said they
disagreed which tells me that they feel the price of magazines is too
expensive for their budget, therefore it would make sense for me to charge
lower than the average music magazine price to entice younger readers to get
into music magazines once again.

14. 6. What have you learnt about
technologies from the process of
constructing this process?
During this project I have learnt a lot of things about different technologies
that I didn’t before. For example different software programs such as
Photoshop, InDesign and Bridge. But also websites as well such as survey
monkey, SlideShare and BlogSpot.

15. Firstly I learnt how to use Survey Monkey which is basically a website that
allows you to make your own surveys and questionnaires and then publish
them for people to fill in, once you’ve gathered enough results you can then
gather your findings and put them in tables and charts etc. this was
completely new to me and I found it really interesting to see the whole
process from start to finish and actually get an end result that you can use.

16. I then learnt how to use Photoshop from scratch, I had never
attempted to use Photoshop in the past so it was hard to use for a
few days but then you begin to pick it up a lot quicker and learn
certain shortcuts which allow you to work a lot more quickly and
efficiently.
I now feel a lot more comfortable when going into Photoshop and
confident that I can produce a quality piece of work, which is more
than I could say at the start of the project.
PHOTOSHOP

17. 7. Looking back on your preliminary
task, what do you feel you have learnt
in the progression from it to the full
product?
I definitely feel I have progressed greatly when I compare my preliminary task
to my final product, as at first it was hard to get used to all the software
involved like Photoshop and InDesign, so in regards to my personal
development using these software's I definitely feel that I have improved
greatly.

18. Comparison
You can immediately tell which one is the superior when put side to side as
the one on the left is very limited when it comes to boldness and text, it all
merges into one and doesn’t look very appealing. As appose to the one on
the right where there is a lot more depth and character to it, the text stands
out, the image is crisp and there is generally a lot more going on. I think this is
with the help of researching into other magazines and seeing how they lay
out their front covers and taking aspects of that and putting it into my own.
And I definitely feel that this a vast improvement and shows how much I have
progressed.