In today's society, people have different sources to get the information that they want to know, such as politics, sports, or celebrities. Printing media hace changed from books, newspapers, and to magazines. The trend of reading media have been changing too. In early centuries, people gather their information from newspaper. Newspaper was an important resource of getting different fields of information or current events. "Magazines were the last of print media to become popular", but they are more toward national and international business. Magazines have wilder range or audience because magazines contain more contents in different fields. The audeince starts from teenage or even younger to 50s or 60s. Magazines specialize in specific field based on their targets, so they can guarantee to keep the readers.
One of the reason that magazines became popular I believe it is because of the photography. Photography plays an important role in magazine industry. Images have huge impact on people's brain these days. Photography always catches people's eyes to start reading the articles. A successful image is necassary. We can especially see this phenomenon on women. In chapter 5, Rodman talks about how women start to compare thmeselves with the models displaying in the magazines. Magazine industries find the professional models to shoot the photography and put it in the magazine and show to the reader, and of course, most of the readers are women. Models' unrealistic perfect figures influence women. Women start thinking that are not perfect enough, so they start purchasing cosmetic, maybe from the ads in magazines. This is how magazines and sponsors' making money. They influence audience's minds with the perfect images in the pages. I'm thinking maybe, the magazine industry should be more realistic to the audeince instead of exagerating the "perfect images"? From this point, we can see how important the magazine is in the trends. They are popular because they know what audience what to see. The gossip of celebrity's life.
Magazines are important. They target the right audience and influence them. Sometimes the information and images are right like those newsmagazines, but sometimes some specific magazines can have a negative impact on people's thought such as "playboys" magazine. It is very difficult to define what magazine is good or bad. It's all depending on individual's behavior.
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1 comment:
I fully agree with your point of view that photography is very important to magazines. The appeal of a magazine just wouldn't be there if there weren't glossy pictures on every page. Nice photos aren't just important to womens magazine, but also magazines like Time, National Geographic, and Gourmet have some great pictures. I also agree that the appeal of magazines comes from their ability to be specialized. There is a magazine for everyone. Sports fans, foodies, fashion lovers, motorsports junkies, vegetarians, yoga enthusiasts... and the list goes on. I think one of the most important things in creating a successful magazine is to have good photographers and a nice format. Even over content, images and formatting (like the cover) take precedent for some magazines. For example, Cosmopolitan magazine: not much content but pretty pictures and a bright, flashy cover. So, it sells.
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