AS Media Coursework Main Task - Target Audience

As I have chosen the genre of my magazine to be Rock/Pop, I have decided to look at other magazines of the same genre to help me achieve my target audience information. As NME is the same genre that my magazine will be, I am going to research it to see what their audience is.
From looking at the National Readership Survey website (www.nrs.co.uk), by looking at the average weekly readership information for NME between the period of July 2008 to June 2009, I can see that the average weekly readership is of 388,000 and that 250,000 of these are in the social grades ABC1 and 137,000 of these are in the social grades of C2DE.
I can see that from the average 388,000 audience members, 339,000 are in the age group of 15 - 44 years old and 49,000 are aged 45+.
The average weekly amount of male readers is 296,000 and the average weekly amount of female readers is 91,000.

Although the National Readership Survey provides me with alot of information of NME's target audience, to get more specific information, I have decided to research their audience further by looking at the information they provide on their website to potential avertisers (http://microsites.nme.com/php/mediapack/).
From this information I can see that NME's readers are:
- 65% male
- 50% are in the age range of 16 - 24
- 23% are in the age range of 25 - 34
- 79% are in the social groups of ABC1.

Another magazine in which I feel would help me in developing my target audience is Mojo Magazine. Looking at the National Readership Survey website (www.nrs.co.uk), I can see that the average weekly readership for Mojo between the period of July 2008 and June 2009 is 286,000 and of this readersip, 212,000 are in social groups ABC1, and 74,000 are in social groups C2DE. Out of the average weekly readership, 217,000 are aged between 15 - 44 and 69,000 are aged 45+.
The average weekly male readership of Mojo magazine is of 227,000 and the average female readership is of 59,000.

Looking at this information, I can see that the majority of NME and Mojo magazine readers are male, aged between 16-30 and are in social groups ABC1.
As my magazine is the same genre as NME and Mojo, I feel that the target audience would be the same. After looking at NME and Mojo's readers I feel that I have conducted enough research to create a profile for a typical reader:

A young male adult, who is probably studying at ALevel/University level, who enjoys going to music events/festivals/gigs and who is in a middle class social group (ABC1).

I have conducted some further research for my target audience by looking at NME's media pack (http://www.ipcadvertising.com/):



(http://www.ipcadvertising.com/resource/fd4e20nlh1xefkowjxdha4xu.pdf).


From this media pack, I can see that:

- 94% of NME's readers have the internet and spend an average of 2.4hours a day online.
- 45% agree that they spend a lot of money on clothes.
- 92% agree that it is important to be well informed about things.
- 84% recieve digital TV.
- Buys an average of 5 DVDs a year.
- 52% own a digital camera.
- Spends £152 on footware a year.

From this research, I can see what things my target audience are interested in, meaning that I can develop this information into my magazine, for example, I could write an article on digital downloading, as, 94% of readers have the internet and spend an average of 2.4hours a day online.

AS Media Coursework Main Task - Introduction

The main task for my AS Media Studies coursework is to produce a music magazine. I have come up with many genres to which my magazine could be such as rock/pop, dance and hip-hop. After careful consideration I have decided to develop my idea of a rock/pop genre as I personally feel I could achieve my best in producing a magazine in this genre as it I am interested in this music and keep up to date with whats happening within the genre. I feel that the skills I have developed in creating my student magazine for my Preliminary coursework task will help me dramatically when creating my music magazine as I have learnt the skills using InDesign such as cropping photos, creating/inserting text frames, changing the specifications of existing text (font size, colour etc.), undoing errors and arranging images and text on the page.
Here is the link to my blog for my Preliminary Coursework task. http://roryoneillmediastudiesas.blogspot.com/2009/10/as-media-preliminary-task.html

AS Media Preliminary Task

For my Media AS Preliminary Task, I have been designing a cover and contents page for a Sussex Downs college magazine. My target audience will be males and females aged between 16 - 19 who are all students at Sussex Downs. I have made many different choices to the style and features in my magazine, that I think will appeal to my target audience.
I have chosen for my magazine to be called 'Student Life' as i feel it is an appropriate name for my target audience, as, they are students and it's all about their student life.

Before I started producing my student magazine, I made a flat plan, as you can see:

I have decided for the headline to be 'Yzzy talks business' as it

I decided to put the features of things such as freshers night pictures, details of a Paris trip and the chance to win tickets to the xmas college party on my front cover as they are all things that students would be interested in, as I have noticed when talking to my friends they are all really interested in college partys and college trips.

I have decided to use a Sans Serif typeface for my magazine as the magazine is aimed at students, in which would want an informal feel from a magazine, giving them a break from everday college life, also to be able to achieve this I have decided to use 'slang' on my cover for the tagline 'ur magazine, ur student life'.

As I want to create an informal magazine for students I have decided to make the page layout very informal and I feel i could achieve this by having the Main sells placed at an angle, which I think would give off a relaxed impression to my target audience of college students.

Here are the photos I took to be used as the main cover picture:

I have chosen to use the photograph on the left as I feel it attracks my target audience of students aged 16 - 19, as it gives that 'care free and cool' attitude that college students usually want to give off; so they can relate to that picture.
I wanted the picture to a medium close us (MCU - head and shoulder shot), so, in my magazine i had to crop the photo to be able to achieve this.

I also made a feature giving students information about a Paris trip, the pictures that go with this feature are pictures that I took on a recent Paris holiday which I went on:

This also applys for the freshers night feature:

Here is my final outcome for my Magazine 'Student Life':

Overall, I think that my magazine has been sucessful and that the target audience of students such as myself would be attracted to reading it as it has features such as freshers night pictures, winning free tickets to a party, information to for a Paris trip, football/netball reviews (to attact both male and female students) and a course review, all in which I believe students would be interested in reading about. To improve my magazine I think that I could incorporated more pictures on my contents page and maybe putting more detail into it as it would give the students more information on what they were reading about. I am pleased with the photos that I have taken for the front cover as the main one gives a care free attitude which most students like to be assosiated with: laid back.
When asking some members of my target audience (fellow students) how I could improve my magazine would be to change the colour scheme becasue it seems a bit dull.