3/7/17 Question 1

How does your product use or challenge conventions and how does it represent social groups or issues?
- My project uses most of the common conventions for magazines. My cover page is eye catching and has a catchy name to draw people in. The name of our magazine is Athletica which would be appealing to people involved in sports and the sporting world. The name draws these people in to read our magazine, helping us to capture our target audience. The way I have organized my cover page is also quite conventional. I have the magazine name prominently featured down the side of the page and the main focus of the magazine bolded with related articles shown underneath. Along with this I also have the cover story stated towards the top of the page in a larger font to draw attention. My table of contents is also conventionally set up. I have all of the articles included in the magazine listed, followed by their page number. My two page spread could also be considered conventional because it is set up as a traditional two page spread would be. It includes the article I wrote with pictures sprinkled in of the subject matter. In terms of how my project was organized and the techniques used to grab readers attention, my project was very conventional. Now, in terms of the focus of my magazine and the type of articles I include in each issue, my magazine may challenge some of the common conventions. First off, Hannah and I chose to focus each issue of our magazine on a different sport based on the season and the popular teams at the time. Since my issue of the magazine is the Spring edition, I chose to focus the magazine on baseball which is a spring sport. Hannah did the fall edition of our magazine so the sport she focused on was volleyball. Since I was focusing on baseball, all of my articles on sports were based on baseball teams, players, or games. I also decided to include more then just professional baseball players. I feature profession, college, and high school baseball players in my articles so that we can attract readers of all age groups. For example, in this edition I included an article called "A Week in the Life of a Division 1 Athlete". In this article I featured Nick Long, a pitcher at the University of Florida. Along with the baseball articles, we also decided that based on the sport we would include some nutrition and fitness articles that go along with the sport. Hannah focused her article on the nutritional portion of the magazine. The nutrition articles included the types of diets some of the athletes have to live by. The fitness portion focused on the types of workouts the specific athletes had to undergo. Rather than having a broad sports magazine, ours is very specific and goes quite in depth on each sport we feature which can be rare to find in sports magazines.
- Our target audience for this magazine are athletes and people involved in the sporting world between the ages of 15-45 to be very specific, although we would love to attract viewers of all ages. We represent this social group by focusing on athletes within these ages. We have kids in high school, college, and professional athletes featured so that each person regardless of their age can connect with one of the athletes we feature. Our magazine focuses on some of the issues of sports by researching problems like the overpaying of professional athletes and writing informed articles that address the issue by giving a two sided view. Overall our magazine does a fairly goo job of representing our social group and some of the issues presented in the sporting world today. - Hope Bumgarner

3/1/17 Popularity Research

For the past week I have been looking into the success of different sports magazine and the popularity of magazines across the United States along with the world. Throughout my research I came across a a list of the 10 most popular magazines. Of the 10 listed not one was a sports related magazine. Majority of these 10 magazines were gossip and celerity based. Going further into my research I did come across a list of the top 10 most popular sports related magazines. Of the 10 listed, Sports illustrated blows the other 9 out of the water in popularity surrounding the amount of sales and readers it has. Sports illustrated is described as "Easily the most famous sports magazine in America, Sports Illustrated is the undisputed authority on the people, news, and events of American sports." When comparing my magazine, Athletica, to Sports Illustrated I can see that there are many similarities. Hannah and I have chosen to focus our sports magazine on a variety of sports while also focusing on certain teams and people which seems to be fairly similar to how Sports Illustrated is written. The only major difference noticeable between Athletica and Sports Illustrated is that Sports Illustrated has a photo shoot featuring the bodies of  many young athletes and models. While this does increase popularity among the magazine this can be seen as compromising the integrity of the magazine for a quick buy. Many of the pictures included can be seen as highly provocative and sexy. This may attract many male readers for the wrong reasons. The inclusion of this shoot could be seen as putting the sports aspect of the magazine on the back burner. Some may say this shoot is a positive while I believe it is somewhat a negative. A photo shoot like this would have to go under careful consideration before trying to include it in my magazine. Hannah and I will have to clarify what lines we are willing and not willing to cross. - Hope Bumgarner

2/22/17 New Orleans Picayune Research

The past few days we watched a video and read an article about the struggles the New Orleans Picayune has encountered over the years. The first question we were asked to consider was how did this newspaper contribute to the common good. It explained in the reading and video that this newspaper exposed many government conspiracies and gave the public the whole truth. After this we were asked to explore the ways in which the newspaper cut cost and increased revenue and how these changes contributed to changing the quality of the newspaper. They cut costs by deciding to only distribute print newspapers 3 days of the week instead of everyday and creating a 24 hour website that reported all of their news. Along with this they laid off thousands of employees. They increased revenue by allowing for a deal of 10 free stories if an online subscription is bought, increasing price of the newspaper, and creating online news apps. While these changes may have been necessary to keep the newspaper alive, I believe it resulted in a decrease of the newspapers quality because instead of getting important news everyday, we were left to search for the "boring" stories and only being provided the entertainment stories. The news began to focus on celebrities and sports more so then the important stories about government and political problems that needed to be public knowledge in order to have informed citizens. All in all I think this opened my eyes and showed me that while I am going to have to make some of these decisions with my magazine, I should never compromise the integrity of my magazine just for better ratings and more money. I need to be sure to keep my magazine on the path I set it out on in the first place. - Hope Bumgarner

2/15/17 Font Revision

While looking over my 2 page spread, table of contents, and cover page, Mr. Elsbree and I discovered that I didn't use the same font for my page numbers on the two page spread. While this may seem like a small oversight, it disrupted the stylistic continuity within the magazine. In order to keep the magazine appealing to the eye of the customer, stylist continuity is extremely necessary. In some fashion, you could say it makes the magazine balanced. It ensure that everything matches up correctly. By having a different font for the page numbers it made the two page spread look a little messy although the page itself was organized nicely. The font I have used for the magazine name and article name is the one I also used for the page number now. It is called Lithos Pro Regular, and it has a very distinct style, therefore making it easily distinguishable. Now it is clear that all the fonts match up well with no oversights. The old two page spread is the top two attachments and below is the revised pages. - Hope Bumgarner 

2/10/17 Superbowl Commercials

 Yesterday in class we watched some of the most popular Superbowl commercials. We took notes on the product, marketing technique used, and who we believe the target audience is.

Hyundai 

• Selling a brand of cars 
• Uses appeal to emotion  and patriotism - they took 4 service members into a 360 degrees room where they encountered live video footage of their families watching the Superbowl with them 
• The target audience was car drivers, family oriented, parents (ages 24-54) 

Mr. Clean 

• Selling a brand of cleaning supplies 
• Uses comedy - Has the Mr.Clean man and women singing and dancing together while cleaning and then Mr.Clean turns into her husband and she then runs over to kiss him - uses the logo that women love men who clean 
• The target audience is men and women who own a house 

Coco-Cola 

• Selling a type of soda 
• Uses appeal to emotion and patriotism - shows people of different kinds all drinking coke - uses diversity - shows that coke binds us as Americans 
• The target audience is everybody 

Our magazine is based on health and fitness. We want to appeal to the younger and middle generation (ages 15-45). We want to include high school athletes in order to keep teenagers interested, while also including professional athletes, fitness/workouts, and healthy eating to keep the adults interested as well. An idea we had for a commercial is having a girl starting off in bad shape, start eating right and participating in a sport so that she becomes very healthy. This would appeal to emotion by seeing someone work hard to better their lifestyle. Also, we may want to feature a professional athlete such as Micheal Jordan, someone who started off bad at their sport but beat the odds through practice and hard work. This would appeal to popularity because others would aspire to be like him. - Hope Bumgarner 

2/8/17 Cover Page Revision

When getting feedback on my original cover page, Elsbree had a few ideas for me to incorporate. First, he explained to me that the text on my cover page was covering Nick a lot so we should try to find a way to space it out so the picture is more prominent. We spaced out the writing near his face, the magazine name, and the Baseball section so that the writing would be more along the outer edges, revealing Nick more.  Along with this, he told me that the section under the word Baseball was a little hard to read because it was small and skinny font. We decided to bold the font so it would be easier to see. Lastly, we Decided to put a gray outline on the magazine name because the black text was hard to see in the upper and lower corners of the page where the background blended with the letters. Comparing the two cover pages, you can see this one is a lot more organized. The new cover is on top and the old one is below it. - Hope Bumgarner 

2/6/17 First Revision

 After thinking over everything that Elsbree and I talked about I decided that the first revision I am going to make is changing the background of my 2-page spread from black to white. In terms of printing, the black pages would cost a lot more for no reason. My font and pictures look just as good on the white as they do on the black. Since our assignment is to create a realistic magazine, we have to take prices into consideration and in my opinion this is one cost that we don't particularly need. I plan next to edit my cover page bit and to possibly collect more of a variety of pictures if I have a chance to schedule more time with Nick in these next few weeks. For right now I decided the page color was the pressing issue so it was the first major revision I made on my magazine project. - Hope Bumgarner