Magazines - component 2 section b - Industry and audience 15-markers

Explore how the set edition of Woman magazine constructs it's target audience [15]

(cultivation...reception...)

KNEE JERK - Woman magazine cultivates an ideology for the target audience, using manipulation in order to ensure financial success.

Are you an A-level beauty?

• Condescending title, direct mode of address reinforces patriarchal hegemonic norms of beauty
• A-level is a high school qualification, and suggests that the aspirations of the target audience are limited, and will have a high school education
• Audience is constructed through the condescending lexis of 'A-level girls', inappropriate for a middle aged target audience!
• MES of a series of diagrams and complex information, creating a highly manipulative and highly singular and stereotypical construction of idealised hegemonic beauty norms. - - - removes diversity, and encourages audience to follow rules and guidelines

A present for your kitchen

• Personification ensures the audience knows how important the kitchen is
• Kitchen symbolises the domain of the housewife, a place of ownership in a patriarchal society!
• "it slots so any girl can assemble it quickly!" - once more reinfirces hegmonic and sexst stereotypes. However, also promotes DIY to target female audience
• A sentence later: "get the man in your life to glue the unit together then paint it" - cultivates a gender binary, and the idea that there fundamental differences between men and women. Also promotes a heteronormative ideology.
• Symbolic annihilation - lack of LGBT representation, as well as BME representation, both targeting and constructing a majority

Contents

• Highly stereotypical in terms of content: fashion, knitting, cooking, beauty. Reinforces the hyperreal ideal of the housewife, living in subservience to a patriarchal society

Explore how Adbusters utilises digital convergence to facilitate production [15]

(power...?...regulation...?...)

KNEE JERK: Adbusters utilises digital convergence in order to create synergistic modes of production and distribution. This is primarily achieved through the relationship between the print magazine and the digital website

• Adbusters targets its niche audience through a confrontational mode of address and a low print run of approximately 120,000 copies an issue. This is emphasised through the high cover price of approximately £10.99 (Adbusters lacks an RRP) in the UK. Therefore, Adbusters must rely on the synergistic nature of the website in order to supplement it financially.
• Website advertises the magazine
• Multimodal interface links to social media accounts
• Selling of merchandise, including anti capitalist shoes commodity fetishim???
• Target audience of adbusters is both nche and unclear
• Interactivity, positioning audiences in a welcoming and fun situation
• Website and magazine have two almost completely different audiences
• (Regulation - breaks IPSO guidelines with 'kill yourself' article)
• Ability to download the magazine in PDF for a cheaper price than the print version