In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

My media magazine mostly uses and conforms to general conventions of a real media product. Some ways in which it does this is through the use of the layout, through aspects such as the masthead, the camera shot, the direct eye contact, position of coverlines and themes. A lot of my inspiration came from ‘Billboard magazine, which has a very simplistic yet fun approach as seen previously in my magazine analysis. As my magazine is aimed at young women, I didn’t want it to represent the same social groups that ‘Kerrang’ or ‘NME’ might, as it wouldn’t be appropriate for my target audience. As with the majority of music magazines, I have kept my masthead at the top of the page right in the centre. A lot of magazines that are extremely well known can get away with their model or feature covering the majority of their masthead because people automatically recognise it from the typeface and/or colour. However, because my magazine is new, it wouldn’t be appropriate to use this convention. I’ve included lots of coverlines over the front cover so that my audience are attracted, which corresponds to the genre of my magazine. As well as this, I have been continuous with my use of colour throughout my magazine including over the contents page and double page spread as it is an important element that ties the magazine together. Throughout the magazine I have ensured that my model keeps direct eye contact with the camera because this is an important and widely used convention to a magazine, and alongside this I have been consistent with a medium close up shot.

The conventions that I may have challenged in my media product can be found through my double page spread and contents page. In my contents page, I have kept it extremely simplistic for a reason. Many magazines will have the contents page as their most active page and it will usually be crammed with information, buzzwords and images. However, when a reader is interested in reading what is inside the magazine, I think it may be a tendency for them to skip over the contents and flick through the magazine to find what page they are after. Mostly I think contents page’s are much too busy and therefore do not attract the sought after attention. Therefore, I have amended this by listing the appropriate page numbers for the cover stories and adding some images. I think this will be much more effective because the reader doesn’t have to search through mountains of information to find what they are looking for. In my double page spread, rather than having one page as the interview and one of a full bled image of the artist, I have decided to dedicate both pages to a full blown interview whilst including the images at the top of the page. The reason for this is because I want my audience to feel like they are getting their money’s worth by having a full two pages of interview and some images of who they are reading about. Whilst some magazines may also do this, I feel that some often include larger images to compensate for the lack of information. Therefore I am breaking this convention so that I can include both aspects of the magazine. A lot of magazines may also decide to have a background or may position their images so that they are bigger or fuller. I want my magazine to look crisp and precise, so I have kept it on a white background with one image against the paper and another of my artist at an awards ceremony.