In this week’s seminar of magazine production, we focused on the importance of how to create a magazine by taking aspects such as style and audience into consideration. We looked at readers profiles and demographics of some magazines such as GQ to help us formulate an idea of who we would be writing this magazine for and what style we would need to meet their readership requirements. When looking at demographics you must focus on age, gender, social class, location amongst other social and political stand points to determine the format and style of a magazine. This is vital as once you’ve determined what demographics your readership falls under you have ensure that the type of articles you are writing fits to their taste.

We then moved on to looking at the roles and responsibilities in magazine production. We were asked to do some self-assessment on our strengths and weaknesses to decide which role would benefit both ourselves and the magazine by analysing our own skillset. Our task was then to create a presentation on what our vision was for the yorkie magazine and what editorial/production roles we would like to take.

 

The Yorkie profile

My intended target audience for The Yorkie…

Age: Ideally, I would aim this magazine at 18-25 year olds as we are of that age and have a knowledge and understanding of their interests and what they would want from a magazine. In addition to this according to the 2011 census, “York had more 20-24 year olds than both the regional and national proportions (10% compared with 7.2% and 6.8%)”, which would make sense for us to aim our magazine towards them.

Gender: In terms of which gender to aim the magazine at, I would have a 50/50 split as I think our sections and articles could be inclusive of both genders.

ABC1: As my vision for The Yorkie is aimed towards a younger generation, I don’t think a big deal of our magazine would be aimed towards ABC’1s however, it will still have something engaging in the magazine for them.

Working/Studying: I would also have a 50/50 split of people who are working/studying as they will have overlapping interests which will be communicated through our sections and articles. A lot of our interests will show through the writing therefore it may lean more towards people studying.

Three words that I would use to describe The Yorkie’s readership would be:

• Youthful
• Woke
• Edgy

 

Sections/content

Sport	Arts/culture	Photography
News/current affairs	Music	Food/drink
Travel	Film	Cheap alternatives/ save the student

Visuals/Themes

                                                                        

 

 

 

When looking at the aesthetics of the magazine I think we should:

• keep it quite minimalistic and neat with images parallel to the writing.
• Have a good amount of photography/ artistic photos/ maybe some illustration
• Images of people who have been interviewed so the reader knows who they are listening to.
• Big text for titles to grab the readers attention
• Have some colour but a main focus of black and white

Roles:

• Writer
• Desk editor
• Photographer
• Sub editor

These are roles in which I have some experience in (Writer and photographer) and feel confident in producing content for. Whereas, desk editor and sub editor would be a good opportunity to broaden my skills and understanding of how these roles work when producing a magazine.