What kind of Institution might distribute your media product and why?

Essay form:

There are four main companies that form the oligopoly. These are Bauer Media, ICP Media, InterMedia and Conde Nast.

The first distributor that I considered on publishing my magazine is Bauer Media; this is a large German publishing company in Hamburg and publishes over 282 magazines. This company publishes many magazines such as: Q magazine, Empire and Kerrang. Due to them not publishing a magazine that has connections with the genre of my magazine I believe there is a possibility that this company would distribute my magazine. Not only because they don’t distribute a genre like mine, however they can also break into a new market of magazines for them.

Another publishing company I have thought would be a possible distributor is IPC, which is one of the largest publishing companies which publish a variety of magazines such as: men’s interest, music, TV guides and many more. IPC also publish one of the biggest music magazines, if not the biggest music magazine; NME. I believe that my magazine again can become successful with this company, as like Bauer Media they do not distribute a magazine like mine, however they have the experience with distributing big music magazines such as NME.

InterMedia is another publisher that distributes many magazines, however the biggest magazine in my interest that they publish is Vibe magazine. This is company would not want to distribute my magazine as I was influenced and inspired by Vibe magazine a lot when producing my magazine. So InterMedia would not be interested in distributing a magazine that is very much like a magazine they already distribute (Vibe) and they would not gain anything from distributing my magazine.

The last company that makes up the oligopoly is the publishing company Conde Nast. They are a very well known company that publishes one of the biggest, most read magazine; Vogue. As they publish one of the biggest magazines in the world, I believe that they could be a good option as they have experience with getting magazine heard by the world. However even though they produce big name magazines such as Vogue, I believe they do not have that much experience with distributing music magazines, which could result in me not choosing this company.

Overall I believe that the best company to publish my magazine is IPC. This is because not only my magazine will benefit from them distributing my magazine however the company would benefit. This is because they do not publish a magazine like mine, which means they can enter a new music genre market. It will also mean I won’t have any inner competition as there is not other magazine like mine that IPC are publishing.

Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

At the beginning of the course I produced a school magazine front page and contents page, which was my preliminary task. As you can probably see the magazine looks very un-professional, as I did not know how to take effective pictures, use Photoshop CS3 effectively or create a magazine in general. However after spending a lot of time researching, planning and drafting I understood as I went on how to create a professional looking magazine that will attract the audience.

Firstly I believe my general knowledge and understanding on magazines has improved tremendously as before I started doing my research I had no understanding on how a music magazine is usually set out and what the editors do to capture the audience. After I had completed the first couple of tasks which were analyzing I was getting to grips with what I had to do; for instance in my preliminary task the sell line for my main article was the same size as the other sell lines, after analyzing front covers I realized that the main feature sell line tends to always be larger than other sell lines. I also learnt that magazines don’t usually have that much empty space as they try to put the highest possible amount of information in them. As you can see I had plenty of empty spaces in my contents page for my preliminary task, however after analyzing some contents pages I realized that for your magazine to look professional it should have hardly any empty spaces, unless you want the ‘simple’ look. Another thing I learnt from analyzing magazines was that there is always a colour theme to the magazine, for instance Q magazine has a red, black and white colour theme.

Secondly, I learnt how I should go about when taking pictures; at first when taking pictures for the preliminary task I didn’t really know what I was doing and what type of angle or distance I had to be in relation to the model. However after looking at magazines, especially vibe, it gave me an idea of the type of picture I wanted in my magazine. So my ability to take photos has improved dramatically in comparison to the quality of the pictures in my preliminary task magazine. As you can see in my final magazine the pictures are to a high quality when considering the angle of the picture and the sharpness.

The other aspect that I have improved on is the technology side, such as editing pictures in Photoshop and creating a magazine in InDesign. Firstly to create pictures that look very clear and professional you need to edit it, whether it is just to take out the background or to change the colour. I believe I have improved my ability to change an average picture to a very good picture through Photoshop and this has helped me when it came to improving the photos in my magazine. I have also learnt how to use a completely new software to me, this is called ‘InDesign’ it is a program that specializes in creating magazines. I learnt how to create a magazine on the program and all the tips and tricks you can do, such as wrap the text around an image or create a boarder that goes on every page using ‘masterpage’.

Overall I believe that I have succeeded in learning new things from how a magazine works to how to use computer programs. It has also taught me how to research and plan for something which in this case was my magazine as before I had never planned to create something such as a magazine.