Tuesday 7 February 2023

Woman magazine - exploring representation and industry issues

 These activities have been presented to allow you to either work independently or in a small group for this session. Please make sure to complete all activities in some detail in your blog. Remember, if you don't write it down, then it's not going in the final exam!

Starter - representations of women in contemporary magazines

Click here to access this task

This is to build contextual information. Please spend around 10-15 minutes on this activity. 

Task one - exploring the ideological implications of advertising

The following two advertisements were included in the set edition of Woman magazine. Both of them present certain sexist, straightforward ideological assumptions about women. But what are they? And more importantly how are they encoded?






1 - Save and import the above two images in to PowerPoint or Slides
2 - Label these two images using key terms from the textual analysis toolkit:
  • Codes and conventions – changes over time? 
  • Layout and design
  • Composition - positioning of masthead/headlines, cover lines, images, columns 
  • Font size, type, colour 
  • Images/photographs - shot type, angle, focus
  • Mise-en-scene – colour, lighting, location, costume/dress, hair/make-up 
  • Graphics, logos 
  • Language – headline, sub-headings, captions – mode of address
  • Copy 
  • Anchorage of images and text
  • Elements of narrative
3 - Select three of the elements you have labelled, and suggest a deeper meaning/signification/connotation/symbolic element to all three of them. 

Task three - the magazine industry



Now read the following information. Again, copy paste.

  • Since its launch, Woman has competed with Woman’s Own (Newnes) and Woman’s Weekly (Amalgamated) to be the top-selling title. The three great rivals ended up as sister titles when their companies merged to become IPC. Their sales peaked in about 1959, at about 2.6m, 3.1m and 1.8m each. 
  • In 1937 Odhams (now IPC) opens printing plant in Watford, Herts with Speedry Gravure Process for colour printing. Woman launched weekly in June with low cover price, 2d, for a full-colour magazine. Within a year, the title was selling 500,000 copies a week