1. Peer review on the blog Glossies and New media
The last months we have been researching the magazine industry and posted several
articles, videos and essays about the future of the magazine industry in a digital era on
our blog. Since some how we have become ‘experts’ on this topic, I will review this week
the blog Glossies and New media of my colleagues Lisa, Tamara, Linda, Manou and
Artie. In this peer review I will discuss the good and bad points of their blog so they can
improve it.
The first thing that drew my attention while looking at the blog were the articles posted
about the magazines in times of economic crisis. It was very surprising to read that luxury
brands are not cutting back on their marketing expenses and that luxury has boomed the
last years even though we are in times of crisis.
An improvement to make to this part of the blog though could be to shorten the
long introduction to the theme of magazines in times of economic crisis. People that read
online scroll over information and click fast from one hyperlink to another one, therefore
information has to be more to the point. Besides in my point of view it is not relevant to
read common sense information as ‘the internet changes society’. This is only interesting
in relation to the main topic of the blog, the developments in the magazine industry.
Secondly, I want to note that the blog is very well structured, you did not use
hyperlinks that lead you to another page where you can read the articles, these are all
posted in the blog itself. This also counts for the videos and the powerpoint presentation
(something my group did not know how to fix).
Concerning the layout, I like the green colors and flowers but they do not really
refer to glossy magazines. The blue characters in the title are also not very easy to read on
the green background.
A last point to improve is that the blogger id ‘who am I’ is not completed yet.
This part shows only your first names but does not say anything about who you are and
what the purpose is of your blog. This can be read in your first article but not everyone
that gets on your blog goes all the way back to the first article.

2. In conclusion; your blog looks nice and is well structured but there are still some
improvements to make. Regarding the content, my advice is to be more to the point and
to shorten some of the long introductions, like the one in the example given above. The
layout should look more ‘glossy like’, with pictures from fashion magazines. Change the
characters in the title to black so this can be read easier and complete the blogger id with
some information about the group members and purpose of the blog.
Sanne Jansen