MediaMedia AS Transitional workAS Transitional workBy Orla Taylor-Davies

Mixmag Magazine Kerrang! MagazineTarget audience: young,

extroverted, club and party going men and women

The bright, loud colours and boldness of the font achieved through shadowing of the main font and clashing colours of the smaller font in contrast with the background reflect the loud, flashy colours of clubs, and of the lifestyle portrayed in dance and hip hop music. Excessive use of exclamation marks gives a hyped up, excited narrative, appealing to its audience, supported by the wild and tough poses of the front cover artists.

Target audience: young, passionate about rock and indie music, interested in live music, predominantly male

The dark and striking colours, mainly monochrome with red and yellow, aren’t typically conventionally appealing to a female reader, so suggest mainly male readership. Several photos of live performers are included, which suggests that the reader is passionate about going to see bands and also about the atmosphere and crowd rock music attracts. Writing is minimal and mainly states bands, suggesting bands in themselves hold great interest for the reader and they expect interviews and reviews.

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Hearst Magazines are one of the UK’s leading Magazine companies; it was

founded in 1910 when Randolph Hearst decided to introduce Good Housekeeping magazine, already popular in the US, to

Britain. Good Housekeeping was launched in 1922 and was an immediate success

with its target audience, women tending to the house while soldiers returned from WW1, and a flurry of equally popular

magazines were to follow…

For example,

Launched as a competitor to Vogue on the brink of the decadence of the 1920’s, Harpers Bazaar is a women’s fashion and lifestyle magazine focussing on the higher end of style and culture.

Including detailed coverage of the arts scene and A list celebrity interviews, Harper’s Bazaar caters to a accomplished and discerning class of young, stylish women who desire quality and substance in their reading material. Hearst magazines says of their target audience that ‘She knows her own mind, yet also appreciates Bazaar’s curated edit, helpful advice, and knowledgeable point of view’, suggesting its are readers independent and informed women, not obsessed with celebrity culture or fashion, therefore superficial or vapid, but instead appreciative of the insight and aesthetics of those worlds to a controlled and tasteful degree . This also establishes the magazine as material of casual entertainment and therefore appeals to the lighter and more relaxed side of the professional woman it caters to.

The Wire is a independent publication, as of 2000, publishing its music magazine of the

same name monthly from its London headquarters. The magazine was founded in 1982, focussing on Jazz and New Music, with the brief to "unravel the mysteries of music

and musicians for those who look for fundamental answers about the nature of

music”. Two years after publication, in 1984, it was brought by Naim Attallah's Namara Group, until independence 16 years later.

The Wire Magazine expels the mainstream and instead focusses on the radical, the visionary and the undervalued artists of Western music.It covers a wide range of genres, from folk to electronic, from jazz to hip hop, but covers what is described as ‘the alternative and underground’ of music.The target audience of this magazine would be someone with access to the up and coming and to the unheard of, and with a dedication and deep passion for ‘proper’ music. The reader would be typically older than the average consumer of other music magazines focussed on more mainstream artists and bands, such as Kerrang or NME, and maybe dismissive of mainstream culture in general. Maybe viewed as pretentious in their taste, but a intellectual and questioning person open to the new and passionate about music as an art form.