10. Exploration of Pre-production Gold font Celebrity used to show gossip, and is recognisable to target audience Pink draws attention to headlines Banner draws attention to most popular topic
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12. Information for ‘Company’ magazine Company magazine is a monthly fashion, celebrity and lifestyle magazine published in the United Kingdom. It celebrated its 30th birthday in 2008 and in that time has had only six editors: Maggie Goodman, Gil Hudson, Mandi Norwood, Fiona Macintosh, Sam Baker, and the current editor Victoria White. The magazine is seen as the UK version of Seventeen Magazine but is more high fashion. The magazine not only has celebrities on the front cover, but it also launches new models. The magazine has recently been touted as a fresher and edgier Teen Vogue. www.company.co.uk www.wikipedia.org.uk
13. Exploration of Pre-production Florescent pink shows up against dark background Florescent green also shows up and word free! Draws attention to extra information White shows up and extra information is in black is less important
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15. Information for ‘Look’ magazine ‘LOOK’, launched in February 2007, delivered a debut ABC of 318, 907 which was the most successful launch in 17 years. It was the first weekly high street fashion magazine for women and has adapted to today’s consumer society, in particular young women’s appetite for shopping. One of its most popular franchises is High Street Hottest, which showcases the latest products to hit the high street. Published weekly. Available for £1.60. The ‘LOOK’ website was launched in 2008. It showcases the best of the high street every day, plus features the latest high street fashion, beauty and celebrity style news. www.look.co.uk www.wikipedia.org.uk
18. Information for ‘Radio Times’ Radio Times had its first issue released on 28th September 1923, producing details of BBC radio programmes. This was one of the times when Radio Times had its largest circulation in Europe. Until the removal of constraints for television listings in 1991, the Radio Times only produced listings for BBC channels, while the ITV-published magazine, the TV Times, carried only ITV and Channel Four listings. Today both publications carry listings for all major cable and satellite television channels in the United Kingdom. Many similar magazines exist from independent publishers but the Radio Times is still the most comprehensive source of UK radio listings in print. Also, since the 22 May 2007 edition, Radio Times has carried two extra pages of TV listings per day as part of a minor change in the magazine's format, bringing it up to 10 pages of listings per day in total. Radio Times is published on Tuesdays, having at one time been Friday many years ago and carries listings for the following Saturday through to Friday. The week including Christmas and the following are published as one double-sized issue, a common feature for the majority of listing magazines. This usually features a generic festive artwork, typical for the magazine which since the 1970s has almost exclusively used photographic covers. There are several regional editions, which of course contain different listings for regional programming. All editions carry variations for adjoining regions and local radio listings. There are now fewer regional editions than there once were because fewer variations in the schedules have led to merging of several editions. The most recent of these is when the Midlands and London/Anglia versions merged into one in August 2007. The exception to this process of merging is Wales, which used to be part of a larger Wales/West (of England) version, mirroring the HTV region. Each day's television is listed over 10 pages or five double-page spreads: two pages of reviews of highlights, then six pages of listings for digital channels. Before digital channels became commonplace, a terrestrial day's television was sometimes spread over up to 3 double-spreads mixed with advertisements, but this format was phased out when independent publishers were allowed to publish television program schedules. The latest circulation figure (July-December 2009) for the Radio Times is 1,000,648 making it third in the TV listings magazine market behind TV Choice (1,302,382) and What's on TV (1,243,933) www.wikipedia.org.uk
19. Audience Review of ‘Radio Times’ “ Call me old fashioned if you will, but I like my Radio Times and I don't envisage swapping to any other TV guide magazine. (I've tried a few and they don't come close.) I remember my Mum buying Radio Times when I was just a child and it's the only TV guide I contemplated buying as an adult. It seems to me that it was the original TV listings magazine and all the other are just pretenders to the throne. The Radio Times is more that just that though. If offers informed opinions on TV programmes, and there are at least three or four full length articles each week related to all things telly as well as behind the scenes looks at up and coming TV programmes. It lists all films separately with a brief synopsis of their storyline. There's a page each week devoted to the topic of Sport, Music, Soaps. On each day of the week there are four double page spreads that list all the major TV channels and numerous satellite ones. Then in the second half of the magazine is all the Radio stuff (which I admit is the only stuff I don't look at.) The Radio Times comes out on a Tuesday for telly that starts the forthcoming Saturday, so you get plenty of warning of when your favourite programmes start. At the beginning of each day is a page on RT Choice, which picks out the best of the days telly for you and also throws in extra background info on how the programmes were made, or a particular actor. I read it almost cover to cover every week. And all this for only £1.10 an issue.” Member Name: devongirlie Source: http://www.dooyoo.co.uk/magazines-newspapers/radio-times/1385830/
22. Information for ‘TV Choice’ TV Choice, is a British weekly TV listings magazine published by H. Bauer Publishing, the UK subsidiary of family-run German company Bauer Media Group. It features weekly TV listings, running from Saturday to Friday, and goes on sale every Tuesday. Launched in 1999, the magazine also has its own annual awards ceremony, the "TV Choice Awards", awarded on the basis of a public vote by readers of TV Choice and its sister publication TV Quick. It costs 42p and includes features on the most watched UK TV shows, the very popular British soaps, as well as puzzles, crosswords, a letters page and prize competitions. The Editor is Jon Peake.
23. Audience Review of ‘TV Choice’ Each day has six full pages of television channels all colour coded with a different colour per channel on the first page which consists of the main five terrestrial channels, and then the rest of the four pages colour coded by category (for example, entertainment is in pink and movies in blue). There are a large range of channels shown in the guide, repeated every day, though it does not show all of the freeview and sky channels - your best bet for this is to go for the sky magazines themselves. Of course, when everything turns to digital soon, perhaps they will add more channels to the guide though this will make it a lot longer and probably more expensive - though I can bet that it will still be the cheapest. The first double page has channels one to five with the evening schedule in much bigger print. Each channel title is in bold colours and all films are boxed in with a small write up. These pages are very easy to read and follow and as I said above, all colour coded. The second double page spread covers entertainment and factual/lifestyle again in colour coded sections though this time a different colour for a whole section. There are 21 channels within the entertainment section and 9 in the factual section. These channels are much smaller than on the first page and sometimes quite difficult to read as they are squashed together in such a small space. Films are not outlined in these pages and there is only one small photo of a film in this section. Freeview channels do have their freeview number by each channel title and as before titles are in bold. The last double page of each day covers children, sport and movies. Children’s have only 6 channels in a third of one page so squashed together tightly making it difficult to read and worse for young children who can read and perhaps decide to have a look. Sport has 7 channels and movies have a whole page of 14 channels. Movies have a better lay out and can be read a whole lot better as they are spaced out well. Again all titles are in bold and freeview channels next to titles though there are not many of them here. The channel pages are easy to navigate though the main problem is that some channels have very small text and hard to read. There are also, as I said before, many channels not in here though if you require more digital channels then a digital magazine is probably better for you. Member Name: elfbwillow1 Source: http://www.dooyoo.co.uk/magazines-newspapers/tv-choice/1454666/
25. Exploration of ‘Soap Opera’ Soap opera stories run concurrently, intersect and lead into further developments. An individual episode of a soap opera will generally switch between several different concurrent story threads that may at times interconnect and affect one another or may run entirely independent of each other. Each episode may feature some of the show's current storylines but not always all of them. Especially in daytime serials and those that are screened each weekday, there is some rotation of both storylines and actors so any given storyline or actor will appear in some but usually not all of a week's worth of episodes. Soap operas rarely bring all the current storylines to a conclusion at the same time. When one storyline ends there are several other story threads at differing stages of development. Soap opera episodes typically end on some sort of cliff hanger. Evening soap operas and those that screen at a rate of one episode a week are more likely to feature the entire cast in each episode, and to represent all current storylines in each episode. Evening soap operas and serials that run for only part of the year tend to bring things to a dramatic end-of-season cliff hanger. In 1976, Time magazine described American daytime television as "TV's richest market," noting the loyalty of the soap opera fan base and the expansion of several half-hour series to a full hour in order to maximize ad revenues. The article explained that at that time, many prime time series lost money, while daytime serials earned profits several times more than their production costs. The issue's cover notably featured its first daytime soap stars, Bill Hayes and Susan Seafort Hayes of Days of our Lives, a couple whose onscreen and real-life romance was widely covered by both the soap opera magazines and the mainstream press. A soap opera, sometimes called "soap" for short (or even simply "operas"), is an ongoing, episodic work of dramatic fiction presented in serial format on television or radio. The name soap opera stems from the original dramatic serials broadcast on radio that had soap manufacturers such as Procter & Gamble, Colgate-Palmolive, and Lever Brothers as sponsors and producers. These early radio serials were broadcast in weekday daytime slots when mostly housewives would be available to listen; thus the shows were aimed at and consumed by a predominantly female audience. The term soap opera has at times been generally applied to any romantic serial, but it is also used to describe the more naturalistic, unglamorous UK primetime drama serials such as Coronation Street. A crucial element that defines soap opera is the open-ended nature of the narrative, with stories spanning several episodes. The defining feature that makes a program a soap opera, according to Albert Moran, is "that form of television that works with a continuous open narrative. Each episode ends with a promise that the storyline is to be continued in another episode". Information taken from ‘Wikipedia’
26. Exploration of ‘Documentary’ Documentary film is a broad category of moving pictures intended to document some aspect of reality. A "documentary film" was originally a movie shot on film stock—the only medium available—but now includes video and digital productions that can be either direct-to-video or made for a television programme. "Documentary" has been described as a "filmmaking practice, a cinematic tradition, and mode of audience reception" that is continually evolving and is without clear boundaries. The word documentary was first applied to films of this nature in a review of Robert Flaherty's film Moana (1926), published in the New York Sun on 8 February 1926 and written by "The Moviegoer", a pen name for Scottish documentarian John Grierson. Grierson's principles of documentary were that cinema's potential for observing life could be exploited in a new art form; that the "original" actor and "original" scene are better guides than their fiction counterparts to interpreting the modern world; and that materials "thus taken from the raw" can be more real than the acted article. In this regard, Grierson's views align with Vertov's contempt for dramatic fiction as "bourgeois excess", though with considerably more subtlety. Grierson's definition of documentary as "creative treatment of actuality" has gained some acceptance, though it presents philosophical questions about documentaries containing stagings and re-enactments. In his essays, Dziga Vertov argued for presenting "life as it is" (that is, life filmed surreptitiously) and "life caught unawares" (life provoked or surprised by the camera). Pare Lorentz defines a documentary film as "a factual film which is dramatic." Others further state that a documentary stands out from the other types of non-fiction films for providing an opinion, and a specific message, along with the facts it presents. Documentary Practice is the complex process of creating documentary projects. It refers to what people do with media devices, content, form, and production strategies in order to address the creative, ethical, and conceptual problems and choices that arise as they make documentaries. There are clear connections in terms of practice with magazine and newspaper feature-writing and indeed to non-fiction literature. Many of the generic forms of documentary, for example the biopic or profile; or the observational piece. These generic forms are explored on the University of Winchester Journalism Department 'features web' where 'long form journalism' is classified by genre or content, rather than in terms of production as film, radio or 'print'. Information taken from ‘Wikipedia’
28. Defining ‘Hypodermic Syringe Theory’ “The hypodermic syringe theory is a theory of communications also referred to as the "magic bullet" perspective, or the transmission-belt model. Essentially, this model holds that an intended message is directly received and wholly accepted by the receiver. The model is rooted in 1930s behaviourism and is largely considered obsolete today.” www.wikipedia.org.uk
29. Applying ‘Hypodermic Syringe Theory’ Ideologies in series’ such as comedies and soap operas can influence fans’ beliefs. For example, the producer of a soap opera chose to portray drugs as a way of getting new, more popular friends. In terms of consequences for the character, they chose to show that the new friends weren’t quite as nice as the main character first thought, instead of showing the negative effect of drugs physically. A passive viewer could then believe that the negative physical effect of drugs on the human body isn’t important in comparison to the social implications.
30. Defining ‘Moral Panics’ “A moral panic is the intensity of feeling expressed in a population about an issue that appears to threaten the social order. According to Stanley Cohen, author of Folk Devils and Moral Panics (1972), a moral panic occurs when "[a] condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests." Those who start the panic when they fear a threat to prevailing social or cultural values are known by researchers as "moral entrepreneurs", while people who supposedly threaten the social order have been described as "folk devils.“ www.wikipedia.org.uk
31. Applying ‘Moral Panics’ Ideologies in series’ such as comedies and soap operas can influence fans’ beliefs. For example, the producer of a soap opera chose to portray drugs as a way of getting new, more popular friends. In terms of consequences for the character, they chose to show that the new friends weren’t quite as nice as the main character first thought, instead of showing the negative effect of drugs physically. A passive viewer could then take drugs in the hope of getting new, more popular friends, without realising the negative physical effects on their body, and have an illness due to the drugs
32. Defining ‘Uses and Gratifications theory’ Uses and Gratifications Theory is a popular approach to understanding mass communication. The theory places more focus on the consumer, or audience, instead of the actual message itself by asking “what people do with media” rather than “what media does to people” (Katz, 1959) . It assumes that members of the audience are not passive but take an active role in interpreting and integrating media into their own lives. The theory also holds that audiences are responsible for choosing media to meet their needs. The approach suggests that people use the media to fulfil specific gratifications. This theory would then imply that the media compete against other information sources for viewers' gratification. (Katz, E., Blumler, J. G., & Gurevitch, M. 1974) There are three main paradigms in media effects: hypodermic needle (i.e., direct, or strong effects), limited effects, and the powerful to limited effects. "Uses and Gratifications" falls under the second paradigm which reached its apex around 1940-1960, when studies helped realize that the first paradigm was inaccurate. www.wikipedia.org.uk
33. Applying ‘Uses and Gratifications theory’ Information - factual information can be gained from the media such as documentary but also in gossip/fashion magazines. For example, I learn information about the origins of current fashion trends and about events in celebrities lives. Personal identity – your taste in genre and form of media consumption. For example, I can be identified by my ‘likes’ and ‘groups’ on facebook. Integration and Social interaction – a topic to discuss with people around you and if you share a common interest/media intake, it can help you to bond. For example, a number of my friends also watch neighbours so we often discuss the latest drama in it and that gives us something to enjoy together Entertainment – enjoying the media because it gives you something to laugh about or escape from reality to. For example, I watch friends regularly as its a comedy which makes me laugh out loud and is lighthearted
34. Defining ‘Two Step Flow theory’ “The two-step flow of communication model hypothesizes that ideas flow from mass media to opinion leaders, and from them to a wider population. It was first introduced by sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld et al. in 1944 and elaborated by Elihu Katz and Lazarsfeld in 1955 and subsequent publications. Lowery and DeFleur argue the book was much more than a simple research report: it was an effort to interpret the authors' research within a framework of conceptual schemes, theoretical issues, and research findings drawn broadly from the scientific study of small groups Unlike the hypodermic needle model, which considers mass media effects to be direct, the two-step flow model stresses human agency.” www.wikipedia.org.uk
35. Applying ‘Two Step Flow theory’ Where the producer of a text can create a belief that the audience gains, or changes the opinion of a belief already had by the audience. For example, in a soap, if someone has sex before marriage and all other characters do not react in a negative way, then this could influence the audience to thinking that it is okay to have sex before marriages. Equally, if someone, before consuming this text, thought that it was not okay, they may change their opinion. However, this would be likely not to affect the belief of a religious person, whose religious belief is not to have sex before marriage.
36. Defining ‘Polysemic Readings’ “Also known as reception analysis, audience reception theory has come to be widely used as a way of characterizing the wave of audience research which occurred within communications and cultural studies during the 1980s and 1990s. On the whole, this work has adopted a "culturalist" perspective, has tended to use qualitative (and often ethnographic) methods of research and has tended to be concerned, one way or another, with exploring the active choices, uses and interpretations made of media materials, by their consumers.” www.wikipedia.org.uk
40. Which do you think is a reasonable price for a TV guide? (£0.10-£0.75, £0.75-1.10, £1.10-1.90, £1.90-£2.75, £2.75-£3.50, £3.50+)
41. Do you prefer the background of a magazine cover to be a single colour or an image of a scene? e.g. just bright blue or a street scene. (single colour, image of a scene)
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43. I should have a range of features advertised on the front, to encourage more people to buy it