Media institutions

 The denotation of a media institution is a company which can do any number of the following things: produce, market, distribute or regulate products. These could be products for sale like magazines (as with the case) or for other forms of media, like the radio or TV for instance.

 An example of a media institution is the BBC. The BBC has products in both radio and television; it produces the media itself and markets it. It markets only what it produces though and will not market for other companies as ITV or channel 4 would (which are each respectable media institutions in their own right). To a certain extent as well it will regulate what is going on inside it (for instance the Russell Brand, Jonathan Ross incident).

 A second example of a media institution would be IPC. IPC media is predominantly in the magazine market and is the publisher of the music magazine ‘NME’ amongst other magazines including a ‘European boat builders magazine’ and a ‘beautiful kitchens magazine’. It produces magazines en masse of which these will advertise other products from IPC media. Hence, as a company, they have a lot of power and income coming in frequently.

Media conventions

 In real products media conventions are put to use in making their magazine what is expected of the stereotypes from it. Throughout my media product (magazine) I used a whole load of conventions attached to the existence of these real life products.

  The first media convention which my magazine takes is the masthead. It is big across the top of the front cover and uses bright colours which stand out; it is also enforced by its repetition on the contents page. This enforces its use and promotes the reader to recognise the masthead, thus promoting the magazine to them. Also on the front cover I used another big convention; the barcode. The barcode, issue number and price, on magazines, are always found on one of the two bottom corners. I decided to put these on the bottom left hand corner going along with a second convention. Thirdly, on the front cover, another common convention is to put the people in question behind the headline. I went along with this aswell, had I done otherwise it would be like saying the magazine had little, or no, point as it gave the articles in it little thought which is exactly the opposite, both for hat I want and the actual case.

 In the contents page I continued to use conventions of my magazine. Noticeably, in magazines that you will read about even the most mundane of things, the editor will always post a little message about how they feel the issue has came out and what to expect from within its pages. In the editors note for my magazine I had the bulk of the text in a chosen font used throughout the magazine to enforce its connection with the product, but for the end ‘signature’ I decided to use a different, more personal, font that would look more like an actual signature in itself. The picture marking the top of the editors note aswell shows personalisation and recognition as we can see for ourselves who it is. Going on from this idea I developed this to put a little about certain members of the magazine who would have written important articles in that month. Bringing another convention into use in the contents page I decided to highlight certain words for impact on the reader, Kerrang in particular uses this to highlight the different sections of the contents whereas I used the convention to pick out certain bands instead. I then decided to challenge one of the contents page conventions. In a lot of contents pages across the board of music magazine they just have the page number down, though usually formatted with some form of highlighting around it. I decided to write out the full ‘page 9’ or whatever page it was on.  I also used various photographs of over ‘fake’ bands to give a feel as though the contents page is trying to drag you into something is enough to keep you captivated until the next issue comes out.

Audience portrait

 The audience portrait for my classic rock magazine is, by nature of its stereotype, very ‘relaxed’. The expected age of the reader would be their late teens (16-20), mostly boys but still a few girls here and then. ‘In it to have a fun time’ – constantly partying, constantly drunk, going to gigs; they would wear just a plain t-shirt and some jeans, a leather jacket for the more outgoing of them (imagine the kids who played in queen’s ‘The miracle’ video but just a little older). They are middle class and their favourite music is naturally rock. 

Front cover, contents page & DP Spread

This is my finished rock music magazine front cover

This is my finished rock music magazine contents page

This is my finished rock music magazine double page spread