J Carolan's Media Blog: Evaluating My Student Magazine

I will now evaluate my Student Magazine, I will do so via this blog post, please notice the questions answered below as they are me Evaluating My Student Magazine :)

"In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?"

- When considering the key ingredients of a magazine I had to really consider who I was writing this magazine for, so to get an idea of what to include for the students around my school I created a questionnaire, the results of the questionnaire can be seen below.

It was thanks to this questionnaire's results that I established a base for what the students around my school wanted to see in a magazine. Considering the age group I was aimed at (which was 16-18 year olds) I needed to design an attractive and eye catching Front Cover, luckily enough I am also included in that age group so for most of my research I played around with many different Fonts, Images and Colours and made something that I found attractive, I also asked the opinions of my fellow media students (who are also between the ages of 16-18) and relating to their feedback made changes where I though appropriate (I also had to consider what was going into the magazine, students around my college seemed to care less for the more gossip side of magazines and looked more towards helpful and trendy topics as you can see in the image of the results, so this was also something to take into account while designing my Front Cover) .

Looking over other Student Magazines such as the ones below.

I found that both of these magazine contained very straight forward and informative Contents Pages, which I guessed was the main point of a Contents Page, to give the reader the knowledge of where to find the articles they were interested in reading. I incorporated these ideals into my magazine by making sure my Contents Page did not have a Layout so abstract that readers wouldn't be able to find what page the article they want is on, I made the design stylish but made sure that the information on, which page contained which article, was the focus and thus gave it what I felt was a stylish and very professional look to it. The only thing I did different to the magazines I examined, was obviously cater the colour, Font and Images to match my magazine but overall I kept the idea of a helpful informative well laid out Contents Page the same.

To summarise, the ways my magazine uses forms and conventions of real media products is that it has a very eye catching Front Cover, information on topics people are interested in, an affordable price, a very well laid out Contents Page and Imaages related to the Articles within that issue of the magazine. The way my magazine develops forms and conventions of real media products is really just through how it is presented, my magazine contains elements such as the ones listed above, but obviously mine are shown diferently e.g. through their colour and Font, so really they are developed and catered to my audience (16-18 year old who attend Saint Edmunds College) through the content of the magazine (the Articles inside) the colours, the Images, the Font and also the Layout on the Front Cover and Contents Page. I wouldn't say my magazine challenged and forms and conventions of real media products, as real media products know how to present themselves to be interesting to audiences and know how to have clear information on, which articles are on what page, so to chalenge these forms and conventions would be to create an unnatractive Front Cover and an overly complex Contents Page.

"How does your media product represent particular social groups"

- First I have to consider which social groups I am representing, in my case it is teenagers between the ages of 16-18 who are students at Saint Edmund's College (as 16-18 was the most popular age group voted on my questionnaire as voted by students who attend Saint Edmund's College). The way I have represented them through my Student Magazine is thanks to my questionnaire, I asked the students to fill out this questionnaire (see below).

Thanks to the students filling out my questionnaire I was aware of what they wanted to see in a Student Magazine, and thanks to this I was able to include the most picked categories in my Student Magazine, so the magazine represents what they like and are interested in finding out about each month (the results also concluded that the Student Magazine should be issued monthly). The choice of Image, Language and Text to Image Ratio was down to what I felt appropriate (as both a 16-18 year old and a member of Saint Edmund's College) and also down to the feedback of my media studies colleagues (as they are also in both the categories I am), I used Images that related to the kind of Information people wanted to know about, for example I made the category people most wanted to know about, the Headline and Image on my Front Cover (which you can see below) so it would attract them into reading the magazine as that is what they wanted to see the most. The language I used was language that I could relate to and understand as a 16-18 year old, most of my age group don't use incredible amounts of slang and so I did not include any, I just used clear English along with the use of exclamation points on the Headline and Cover Lines just to show how important the articles inside the magazine are. For Text to Image Ratio I would say my Front Cover is mostly Image, as it is one Image taking up most of the Front Cover accompanied by some text just detailing the most interesting articles of the magazine but for my Contents Page it is much more strong in text, as text is really the main idea of the Contents Page, it is there to tell people where to find the articles they are interested in reading about, though I did use image to give a better idea of some of the information included in some of the articles and also gave an image of the editor, just so people could get a better idea of the person who edited that issue of the magazine.

(below is my Front Cover and Contents Page just to help give off a better idea of the types of things I just talked about when answering the question)

One final thing to think about is the representation of 16-18 year olds who attend Saint Edmund's College my Student Magazine gives off. I believe it gives off a very good representaion as older audiences tend to look upon 16-18 year olds as irresponsible, party animals that don't care about their education, but my Student Magazine disproves that. It disproves it, as all the articles in my magazine were based off of what 16-18 year olds wanted to read about, and as you can see from my questionnaire results, the top picked category was "GCSE and A-Level Advice" showing obviously that 16-18 year olds clearly care about their grades, other categories included trendy things such as "Latest Films" and "Latest Music" which doesn't give off a bad impression at all, what really showed a good impression was that "Latest Gossip" wasn't even chosen in the end as it had very little votes out of all of the people who took the questionnaire, disproving the stereotype that 16-18 year olds are only into gossip and partying. So in the end, as I mentioned at the beginning I believe my Student Magazine gives a very good representation of those that attend Saint Edmund's College that are between the ages of 16-18, so it shows off a good representation of not only age, but the school at which they attend as well.

"What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?"

- From research I cannot find a type of media institution that actually publishes Student Magazines, I found that it is usually inside-school groups that publish the Student Magazines, funded of course by the school, so I suppose you could say individual schools that have a media institution (such as a Student Magazine staff) are the publishers of Student Magazines like mine. My school may want to publish my Student Magazine because it does what some magazines fail to do, which is really address the people on what they want to read (thanks to my questionnaires I was able to know what people wanted to read about and thus could provide them with that information) so therefore if my Student Magazine were to be published, my school would be able to rest easy knowing the money they paid for the paper and ink it requires to print my magazines would not be wasted as people would be reading the magazine, as it contains what they want to know. I would like to mention that Saint Edmund's College recently set up a Student Magazine, I am not saying mine would be better though as their Student Magazine has to address every age group throughout the College (so it addresses 10-18 year olds) and so contains a lot less for each age group as it has to make room for everyone, I do believe mine would be a better magazine directed at the sixth form though (those doing A-Levels) as they are of the ages of 16-18 and thus the magazine would contain much more interesting topics for them to read about, also obviously because it is a Student Magazine vulgar language and adult themes would be avoided, so it would not matter if younger members of the College came into contact with the magazine because the worst that could happen is them not being interested in the articles within the magazine.

"Who would be the audience for your media product"

- Thanks to my questionnaires this has all been narrowed down, The age group my magazine is aimed at is 16-18 year olds, the gender it is aimed at is both and the general profile of my audience is students that attend Saint Edmund's College.

"How did you attract/address your audience?"

- I will spend some time here talking about what on my magazine Front Cover is attractive to readers.

First of all the colours, I chose very strong, vibrant, clashing colours because this would really draw the eye of the possible readers to the magazine, because the magazine sticks out. I chose an exciting type of Font for the Masthead so that it would make people more interested in reading the magazine, if I had provided a boring Masthead saying "SMASH!" written in Times New Roman Font with just black colour I don't think it would stand out or make many people want to read it, as it would appear dull, a magazine that appears enthusiastic, in my opinion, is what attracts people to reading it hence why I used exclamation points in various places, exciting Font and in bright colours. I chose to highlight the cost with an explosion effect in bright colours on the Front Cover as I figured if people know the price and it is low (and considering this was only £1.00 I considered it a very good price) people may want to buy it more as they figure it's very cheap, magazines that cost more tend to hide their prices nearer the top or bottom corners because the people creating them know if people spot a high price before they spot the kind of articles inside they may instantly think it is not worth what they would be paying for it and thus not buy it (hence why I made my price so noticeable, as it is so low). The final thing I discuss is my use of the Image on the Front Cover, it attracts people as it relates to the Main Article and also because it takes up blank space, a magazine that appears to not have much to show makes people think it does not have much to offer and therefore is not worth their time or money. To ask me "why would someone want to buy my magazine" would be met by me explaining how my magazine gives the people it is aimed at what they want to see. My questionnaire provided me with the research on what the readers wanted, I provided what they wanted in my magazine so obviously if I were to have my magazine published, my audience would be provided with a magazine that offers them things they are interested in and accompanied by it's very reasonable price, it would sell. It helps that the age group I am aimed at is only 16-18 year olds as it allows me to fill an entire magazine with things that year group is interested in reading about.

"What have you learnt about technologies from the processes of constructing this product?"

The technologies I used for my Student Magazine included, Adobe Photoshop, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Publisher, Digital Camera, Scanner and Blogger. Below is a list of things I learnt for each technology.

For Adobe Photoshop I learned about using many different tools, as in the past I have only dabbled in Photoshop work. the main things I learnt about were things such as Cropping Images, Recolouring Images, use of Layers, use of Navigation (inside Photoshop), How to make parts of Images transparent and use of various small artistic tools such as Smudge and Blur (which I actually did use on my Masthead on my Front Cover to give a more stylized feel to it).
For Microsoft Word it didn't learn anything new, as I only used it to write up my questionnaire.
For Microsoft Publisher I learnt about formating the page to give Rows and Columns and also that you can actually do basic cropping on Microsoft Publisher (which came in handy when I needed to crop something quickly) and one last thing I learnt is how to instantly turn a colour transparent which was of great help to me when importing images straight onto Microsoft Publisher that had white backgrounds.
For Digital Camera I did not learn anything new, although I did get a chance to experiment with Camera Shots that I learnt about in my Media Studies, some of which were of great help to me (for example my Front Cover, without the teaching I received I would have not thought of the angle at which to take that photo).
For A Scanner I did not learn anything new, as I have used scanners before and really all there it to it is scanning an image into the computer, so nothing new was learnt here.
For Blogger I learnt quite a fair amount, as I have never used Blogger before so everything that I was doing was new to me, creating posts, posting up polls and putting up images on my blog was all new to me, but those were the main things I learnt about, besides that Blogger did not provide me with anything new to learn.

Below, to the Left are photographs I took with a digital camera, just to show what I meant about how I got to experiment with Camera Angles I had learnt about, and their effect. Below to the right is an image I was given the first time I used Adobe Photoshop, then with instructions was told to turn it into something which resembled a cookbook, below that is the result, showing off just a small amount of all that I learnt to do using Adobe Photoshop.