Evaluation C

Evaluation C

The products that I am going to compare my product with are Edge Magazine, Games Master, Xbox the official magazine and the Northern Echo, most of these products fit into the same genre as mine which is gaming, and the Northern Echo is my client and they have the same audience as my product.

Edge Magazine is similar to product in terms of gaming content, which is why I chose to compare my product to this one, the content in our magazine a reasonably similar, how we are both talking about different platforms and not just focusing on one such as PC or Playstation. Our audiences are also very similar although Edge has a much wider audience as they are targeting all of the UK whereas I am only targeting the North East as my client is the Northern Echo which means I am working for them with this product, another difference with our audiences is because my product is also a lifestyle magazine, which helps people learn how to improve their style of life in ways such as health or learning more about society so my secondary audience is people who want to improve their lifestyle which is very different from the stereotypical audience who Edge target. 

The institution that makes Edge is called Future PLC, they are renowned in the UK for publishing more than 180 magazines in fields such as gaming and technology, this is the Institution I chose to market my product because as well as Edge magazine they also produce other magazines in my genre such as Games Master and Xbox the official magazine which are products I will discuss later. The reason I chose this company to market my product was because of the fact that they have a lot of experience in this field and the products they have marketed in this field have all been relatively successful which tells me that they will be able to make my product successful as well.

Another product I am comparing mine with is Games Master, this is similar to Edge magazine in the way I am comparing mine with it, it covers all platforms with its content like Edge does, but another reason I am comparing it is because of the audience that it targets, I believe the audience is a bit younger than Edge because of the content in the two products, for example Edge seems to get more technical with terminology and articles, whereas Games Master likes to keep their content more simple with reviews and countdown etcetera. The reason I am looking at this product is so I can deliver the right content for my age groups and be more like Edge than Games Master.

Games Master is also market by Future PLC which is again helpful for me because that is the same institution that I chose to market my product. Another reason I want to compare this product with my own is because I believe it is a lot more friendly towards its audience than ‘Edge’ and ‘Xbox official magazine’ because these magazines are a lot more technical in their fields and therefore lose touch with the audience, Games Master creates a good relationship with its audience which is what I am trying to do while delivering high quality content.

The last Magazine I am comparing mine to is ’Xbox the official magazine’ the reason I chose this is because I wanted to compare my product to one that only focuses on one platform. The target audience in this will be slightly different to any others I have discussed so far as they are bound to be Xbox users compared to the likes of ’Edge’ who’s audience could be users of any platforms and obviously this will drastically change the content in the product.

The reason I am comparing my product to this one is because it strictly only considers the Xbox platform, and I want to see if this results in a better level of content because they don’t have to take any other platforms into consideration which could mean that they focus more on the Xbox platform which results in better content, I believe my comparing my product to this I could look at their level of content and therefore create a product that has a effective content.

The final product that I am comparing mine to is the Northern Echo, the reason I am comparing it to this is because they are my client which means I will targeting the same audience that they target. The Northern Echo have to maintain a good relationship with their readers so that they keep on buying their product, which means I need to maintain a good relationship with the audience. By comparing my product to the Northern Echo and taking some of the aspects that makes them so friendly towards their audience I think I would be able to create and effective product.

My product needs to be almost exactly the same as the Northern Echo in the way that it approaches topics, audiences and subjects and by comparing my product to them I will be able to do that which will allow my audience to treat my product exactly the same way that they treat the Northern Echo.

Content

The Northern Echo gets a lot of content from things such as specialised journalist, technology and social networking facilities. Specialised journalists are experienced in creating articles and have a lot of qualifications to do so, they know where to go and where to look for stories and how to get the breaking news before anyone else which helps create content that is of a high level of quality and also content that you will not find anywhere else.

I believe if I had a specialised journalist working on my products not only would I have had a higher level of quality in my article I would have had more effective article ideas to write about and include in my product, as their experience shows that they wrote great articles about a wide variety of subjects and made them interesting which will help draw a wide audience in.

They can also get their content from feedback from their readers, such as if someone informs them on a story they were not aware of, or if they get updated on a story through their readers they will be able to put it in the next issue and therefore they have more content.

Even the people who pay them for their content are helping them find more content which is a very effective cycle for the Northern Echo to follow. If I had the opportunity to get feedback from my readers I believe it would help me like it helped the Northern Echo in that it would not only give me new stories but it would also help me to improve my product to make it more reader friendly thus bringing in a bigger audience.

They get a lot of their content through contacts. The Northern Echo are bound to have contacts all over the region informing them on either updates with current or past stories or even informing them on new stories in the North East, which helps them get new content for the next newspaper, and if it is a big story it will help bring in bigger audiences.

If I had contacts like these it would help me give my audience higher quality content because it would be more up to date as these contacts would inform as soon as a new update or a new story broke, and I believe by giving this type of content to my audience it would help to create a strong relationship with my audience and possibly bring in bigger audiences.

Social networking facilities are possibly one of the strongest ways that the Northern Echo are able to get their content, for example as soon as one story breaks or is rumoured on a social networking site such as Twitter then all of News stations and newspapers are all over it and trying to cover it and trying to get their coverage out to the region first.

If I was able to do this I think it would help me to create a better relationship with my reader as they would get coverage of a story as and when it breaks hopefully before anyone else which would help bring in wider audiences because they would not be able to get this information and coverage anywhere else.

Structure

The odd numbered pages in my product are possible the most important because we have been taught to read from left to right our whole life, so it is important to make the odd numbered pages look slightly more attractive to the audience than the even number pages in my product. For example in all of my article there is not a lot of text on the odd numbered page compared to the even number pages, I believe if there was a lot of text the the audience would be overwhelmed by it all and not want to read on.

Most of the stories in my magazine are featured on the front page so that the audience know what is included in the magazine so they can decide whether to buy it or not, the stories that or not featured on the front page are therefore featured in the contents page where everything in the magazine is revealed to the reader. Obviously in Newspapers there is not a contents page as usually the front page acts as the contents page for the main stories for example ‘more on page 4’ which is a phrase that usually appears on the front page of a newspaper.

In some of the professional products that I have looked at there cover stories and features are usually placed in the middle of the magazine, I believe this is so people flick through some of the regulars so that the magazine can try and build reliable audience that will come back for each as they enjoy reading the regulars and the features. In my product all of the features are placed  in the middle of the magazine although it is only a small product, so they could be easily mistaken for being at the front of the product.

There is a lot of advertising in magazines, sometimes the audience can be reading an advertisement and not even notice it because the magazines semantic field could be related to the advertisement, for example advertisements of football boots in football magazines are so detailed they differ from the stereotypical advert that you would expect to see. Although usually adverts are placed at the front of magazines, my adverts consistently run through the whole product and they are evenly spread out throughout the whole product.

The magazines I am comparing my product to are much longer than my product there differ between 50- 100 pages each, which is much more than what my product contains. The only thing missing from my product is a few regulars, other than that there isn’t a lot that is missing, there just isn’t enough content in the magazine, so if there was more features and stories involved I believe that I would have a much more effective product.

Code and Conventions

In my product there is a quite  wide variety of story types used, they consist of a list which is a countdown of the greatest games of 2013, an interview with a young man who fits keeping a healthy lifestyle and gaming into his schedule which helps my audience possibly have a window to their future self, and also an informative article about the ordeal girll gamers face because of stereotypes.

The length of the article’s are the same throughout each of my article, which is about 500 words, this is so my audience don’t get overwhelmed by a lot of text and will want to read the article opposed to reading a long article and getting bored. The text to image ratio is also the same in my articles which is about 50:50 again this creates a good impression on my audience as they are a young audience and I know that young people do not like to read long articles otherwise they get bored.

The imagery I have used have different convention in each article in my ‘Gaming Lifestyle’ article I think the imagery in there acts as a window to their future self, this is because the article is about fitting keep fit and gaming and how you can do both, so you don’t have to pick one, and hopefully my audience will look at the imagery or the model as a window to their future self.

In my ‘Girl Gamer’ article there is evidence of metaphorical evidence, the image is of the model reaching for a gaming controller instead of make up, which is obviously different from what the audience would expect to see but I believe that is a positive thing because it makes the audience think about the subject of the story and realise that they are no different to the male audience that I am targeting with this product.

The introduction to the articles in my product are relatively the same they are all descriptive of what I will talk about in the article and what will be covered, this allows the audience to realise if they want to read on and if the introduction is wrote correctly then they usually do read on. There is also evidence of a question introduction in the ‘Girl Gamer’ article, this also tries to make the audience read on because it asks them a question that they won’t have a good response to unless they read this article.

I have tried to use the three colour palette rule with all of my articles with colours that relate to the article semantically, such as in the ‘Girl Gamer’ article it was pink, black and white and in the ‘Gaming Lifestyle’ article it was white, blue and grey. Keeping this three colour palette rule helps to keep the article neat and tidy whilst not having an explosion of colour on the page which can make the article layout look messy and not organised.

I used three columns in all of my articles to keep the layout of each article neat and tidy and so that the audience does not get overwhelmed by all the text on the page. In my ‘Top 5 Games of 2013’ article I have created a profile for each game I talk about, but I have done it in such a way that it fits in with the three column that I have on each article so it kind of has a tile effect throughout the article.

Technology

Obviously if I had professional photographers working for me my product would have turned our better and more effective, for example they have access to better cameras such as Cannon D20, which is a better camera than the SLR that I used, and if I had this my photograph quality would have turned out a lot better. They would also have access to a wider selection of lenses which would have gave me the opportunity to be more create with the lens selection during the photography part of production which would have created a more effective product.

If I had better models, the photograph would have also turned out better and the audience would get the message that each photo is trying to portray a lot easier, the same with make up and costume designers, they would help portray the message each photo was trying to portray.