Magazine Media Literacy: Step Two

ECOMP 6016 - Assignment #5C: Select ONE magazine that you normally would not read. Post your answers to the following questions:

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1. What is the name of the magazine?  Us Magazine
2. Explain why you  wouldn’t be interested in the magazine you’ve selected.  This magazine is all about celebrities and the exploration of not just the work they do but what goes on in their lives as well. Reading about the lives of such famous people would not be my first choice, not that I haven’t sat down in the break room at work and read a similar magazine, but in those situations it is more out of boredom than interest. If the articles are about what the person is doing for work then that’s fine. It’s when the articles are about what their person is doing in the private life that often times turns me off, especially when the tone of the article comes across as exploitive and intrusive. To read such articles I feel disrespects their right to privacy and encourages the paparazzi to continue to stick their noses/cameras where perhaps they shouldn’t be.
3. Are there offensive stories or ads?  Some of the articles, those that seem intrusive, I would consider offensive because if I were in their shoes I would not appreciate that level of invasion into my private life. What I found truly offensive was the constant notices from my web browser that it had prevented the site from opening a pop-up window. It is bad enough the number of animated ad banners strewn about the webpages, but the pop-up windows cross the line because they are a popular vehicle through which viruses and malware are delivered.
4. Are you simply not the targeted audience?  Based on the ads for female clothing, cosmetics, and other products I would guess that I am not part of their target audience.
5. Are you not amenable to the techniques of persuasion the magazine uses?  The magazine clearly uses the two basic persuasion techniques of beautiful people and celebrities to draw readers in. If you can find the text within the forest of images, many headlines use intensifiers to get the reader to click on the article.
6. Are there images that you object to?  The majority of the images posted throughout the articles are of celebrities at public events, on the set of a television or movie productions, or from photo shoots. Anyway has to be ready for themselves to show up on someone’s camera at such events regardless of who you are, so I don’t find these images offensive. It’s the images taken with telescopic lenses that intrude on the celebrity’s privacy that I have an issue with, but I didn’t see any images like these on Us’s website.
7. Include the URL for the magazine.  http://www.usmagazine.com/

Magazine Media Literacy: Step One

ECOMP 6016 - Assignment #5B: Select ONE magazine that is online and captures your interest. Post your answers to the following questions:

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1. What is the name of the magazine?  The Week
2. Who is the target audience?  It took some digging, but under the link at the bottom of their site entitled “AD INFO” I found a brief description of their intended audience: the “busy executive.” Now, I’m by no means an executive or anywhere near it, but I am busy being a teacher and a learner. [http://ads.theweek.com/ad_info/home.php]
3. What are the titles of a few articles?  One of the reasons why I like to read this magazine is because of its variety in articles from national and international stories to both written and video entertainment. On Wednesday, June 1st the following articles were available for reading:
   ~“The House’s ‘phony’ debt-ceiling vote: A win for the GOP?”
   ~“Can a ‘general amnesty’ save Syria’s Assad?”
   ~“Could solar panels on the moon power the Earth?”
   ~“Is 4 years old too young for kindergarten?”
4. What kinds of visual images are displayed?  Almost every article heading is paired with a photograph or illustration meant related to the topic. Opinion articles are tagged will illustrations of the authors. Almost every page contains sections with images and title headings that try to connect the reader to other stories, from a “featured articles” box to a “Must Clicks” horizontal header bar. Sometimes these images are paired with the article titles and other times subject areas (e.g. opinion, technology, lifestyle). And of course, what news magazine would not be without a political cartoons section (and I’ll admit to it, this is one of my favorite sections).
5. What are typical advertisements selling?  First and foremost the website has advertising for itself spread throughout the site. The majority of the self-ads promote subscribing to their magazine in paper form, followed next by downloading their iPhone or Android app. (these are currently free). The site does support advertisements from a variety of businesses including other news outlets, hotels, manufacturing, information technology and service-oriented businesses.
6. What techniques of persuasion do the articles, images and ads use?  In their “about us” section they use the basic persuasion technique of intensity, stating that they pull news from the best sources and cover the latest developments in a variety of news categories. In ads, when you look at how many times and in how many places they advertise themselves via subscriptions or their portable app. you can’t help but thing of the repetition form of persuasion. Within some of the articles I sense some advanced card stacking persuasion going on or rather, an attempt to remove this persuasion from the issue being discussed in that commentators are responding to an initial author statement and debate its merits, including additional information and/or disputing other data. Sometimes I will take what might be considered the very basic approach of noting to which side of the room a commentator seems to lean, specifically the commentator who speaks first in the article and who speaks last, essentially getting the last word for the story.
7. Include the URL for the magazine.  http://theweek.com/