Monday, November 29, 2021
Saturday, November 27, 2021
Friday, October 15, 2021
Sunday, September 12, 2021
Friday, September 10, 2021
Wednesday, September 8, 2021
Thursday, July 22, 2021
Sunday, July 4, 2021
Tuesday, June 29, 2021
Friday, April 2, 2021
Thursday, March 25, 2021
Industrial Context: Bauer Media
Bauer Media Group is a German multimedia conglomerate headquartered in Hamburg. It operates worldwide and owns more than 600 magazines, over 400 digital products, and 50 radio and TV stations, as well as print shops, postal, distribution, and marketing services. Bauer has a workforce of approximately 15,000 in 13 countries.
Bauer Media has been managed by five generations of the Bauer family. Originally a small printing house in Germany, Bauer Media Group entered the UK with the launch of Bella magazine in 1987. Under the name of H Bauer Publishing, they became Britain's third-largest publisher. Bauer further expanded in the UK with the purchase of Emap Consumer Media and Emap Radio in 2008.
In the UK, there are two divisions of the Bauer Media Group. The original UK business trades as H Bauer Publishing. Its sister company is known as Bauer Media.
H Bauer Publishing brands include women's weekly and TV listings magazines, namely Bella, Take a Break, that's life!, TV Choice, and Total TV Guide along with several puzzle magazines.
In 1987, Bella was H Bauer's first venture into publishing in the UK. In 1990, H Bauer launched a weekly women's magazine named Take a Break. H Bauer also has a sister title, that's life! that launched in 1995. The H Bauer Publishing brand also includes puzzle magazines that carry the Take a Break name.
1991 saw H Bauer's first TV listings publishing with the launch of TV Quick magazine (before the de-regulation of TV listings in March 1991, BBC listings had been restricted by law to Radio Times and ITV/Channel 4 listings to TV Times). TV Quick ceased publication in July 2010. IN 1999, H Bauer launched TV Choice at a much lower price point than other titles on the market. TV Choice overtook its main competitor in February 20088 audited ABCs and has been the number one weekly newsstand magazine in the UK since. In September 2003, H Bauer launched Total TV Guide to cover the increasing number of programmes available on Freeview and satellite or cable services.
Bauer Media is a multi-platform media group, with locations across the UK. Following their purchase of Emap in 2007, The Bauer Media Group acquired a collection of media brands. This includes heat and Grazia as well as a radio portfolio of national radio brands such as KISS FM UK and Magic, and regional radio brands across major UK cities. In 2013, Bauer Media also acquired the Absolute Radio Group fro Times of India.
Bauer Media also broadcasts TV music channels included The Box TV, in a joint venture with Channel 4. In the UK, Bauer Media is the sister company of H Bauer Publishing, which publishes titles including Take A Break.
Wednesday, March 24, 2021
Industrial Context: Magazine Industry
- Consumer (general and specialist) sold in newsagents.
- Business/Trade/Professional/B2B - for people at work.
- Cosumer Publishing/Contract Publishing/Custom - produced by publishing agencies for organisations to give to their customers as a form of marketing.
- Staff Magazines - produced by a company's internal communications team or a publishing agency to inform staff about their company.
- Newspaper Supplements are free with a daily or Sunday paper.
- Part Works - a set number of issues builds up into an 'encyclopedia' on a specific topic.
- Academic Journals - for university-level discussion of all sorts of arcane topics.
- Bauer (German group that took over the 2nd largest group, Emap, in 2008): 26%
- IPC (Time Warner): 20%
- Burda (another German group that acquired Immediate Media, publisher of Radio Times, in a deal worth £260 million in 2017): 8%
- National Magazines (Hearst): 7%
Monday, March 22, 2021
Industrial Context: History of Magazines
1586: Josse Amman, a Swiss painter, publishes plates on the
fashions of the day, with the title Gunasceum, sive Theatrum
Mulierum ... (The Gynasceuym or Theatre of Women, in which are
reproduced by engraving the female costumes of all the nations of Europe).
Published in Frankfort in Latin; regarded as the first fashion magazine.
1693: The Ladies Mercury published by John Dunton, at first monthly and then
fortnightly. It concerned 'all the nice and curious questions concerning love,
marriage, behaviour, dress, and humour in the female sex, whether virgins,
wives, or widows.' It also carried an 'Answers to Correspondents' section.
1711: John Tipper publishes The Ladies Diary or
Woman's Almanack.
1725: The Ladies Diary runs small ads, among them for false teeth. Later
issues ran display adverts for beauty products. Until this time, the term
'advertising' meant feature articles and reports.
1731: The Gentleman's Magazine is published by Edward Cave in England. Intended
to entertain with essays, stories, poems, and political commentary. Closed
1914. Often regarded as the first modern magazine.
1734: Lloyd's List,
the shipping trade title, founded.
1741: First US magazine, American Magazine.
1742: Ben Franklin's General Magazine prints
first US magazine advertisements.
1796: German Alois Senefelder develops lithography to
produce high-quality printed images.
1828: Modern Spectator founded.
1835: Railway Gazette founded.
1839: Fox Talbot produces photographs from negatives.
1841: Punch launched
in London; inspired by French magazine Charivari.
1850: The number of magazines published in the US reaches
685.
1852: Mills in Germany begin producing wood pulp for papermaking, replacing
rag-based paper for newspaper and magazine printing.
1853: The Field launched.
1861: First colour photography.
1871: Charles Austin Bates
establishes the first advertising agency offering “creative services.”
1882: Photos sent by wire.
1885: The Graphic publishes a photo-picture
story about a visit to a zoo.
1886: Cosmopolitan launched in the US as a
fiction magazine. First Berne Copyright Convention.
1890: 4,400 magazines reach 18
million circulations in the US.
1890s: Football clubs publish
programmes and magazines.
1892: Four colour rotary press. Vogue
founded by Arthur Turnure and Harry McVikar.
1893: In the US, Frank Munsey cuts
the price of Munsey’s Magazine to 10c and the cost of subscriptions to
$1 to boost sales and seek profits from advertising revenue rather than copy
sales. McLure’s Magazine launched by Samuel McLure achieves high sales
using a cheap cover price model (10c) and ‘muckraking journalism.’
1894: Billboard Advertising launched in the US; becomes Billboard in
1897.
1895: First issue of US magazine The Bookman.
1900: British magazines widely distributed around the empire and the
US.
1909: Conde Nast buys Vogue, by then a
struggling New York society weekly. Under editor Edna Woolman Chase, it becomes
a photo-fashion monthly for upmarket women.
1911: Photoplay launched
in the US, a movie fan magazine.
1918: Reader's Digest launched (US).
1919: Under editor George Horace Lorimer, Saturday Evening Post published
a 200-page issue, 111 pages being advertising. The publication was by this time
selling a million copies a week with famous authors and Normal Rockwell’s
covers.
1933: Photo-based news magazines start to appear in the UK on the lines of
the German titles: Pictoral Weekly; Weekly Illustrated (1934); Picture
Post (1938).
1934: Radio Times overtakes
John Bull as the biggest-selling magazine, with sales of 2 million a
week, a position it would hold until 1993.
1937: Odhams (now IPC) opens a printing plant in Watford, Herts with Speedry
Gravure Process for colour printing. Launches Woman weekly in June with
low cover price, 2d, for a full-colour magazine. Within a year, the title was
selling 500,000 copies a week. Saturday Evening Post selling 3 million
copies a week, the largest circulation in the US.
1940: The Luftwaffe mounts its Blitz, focusing on the manufacturing cities
such as Birmingham and Coventry and ports such as Liverpool and London. The area
around St Paul’s Cathedral and along Fleet Street is devastated. Paternoster
Row – the centre of the publishing trade – is flattened and the publishers
never return to the area.
1946: More than 200 mass-oriented magazines launched in the US.
1970: TV Times claims
to be ‘the most used weekly colour magazine in Britain’ on the strength of
selling 3,125,000 copies a week with a readership on 10,224,000.
1972: Cosmopolitan UK
is the first international edition. Under Joyce Hopkirk; had been reformulated by
Helen Gurley Brown in the US. Goes on to become the world’s best-selling woman’s
magazine – and best-selling in the UK until the arrival of Glamour in
2002. Feminist monthly Spare Rib launched by Marsh Rowe and Rosie
Boycott. WHSmith refused to stick it. Grew out of the underground press.
1982: Computer magazines, such as Acorn User at Addison-Wesley in
London, start to use e-mail systems and online bulletin boards, in this case,
Dialcom.
1985: Postscript-based software, such as Aldus Pagemaker and Adobe Illustrator
running on Apple Mac, allied to laser printers, herald the advent of desktop
publishing. This revolutionises the production of magazines and newspapers.
1994: IPC launches Loaded with James Brown as the editor – the start
of a boom in ‘lads’ magazine. First banner advertising on the web, for Wired
magazine (US). December issue of Vogue carries a half-page advertisement
for www.condenast.co.uk.
Sunday, March 21, 2021
Friday, March 19, 2021
Wednesday, March 17, 2021
Monday, March 15, 2021
Planning: Reflection on Moderator's Report
General Overview:
- The strongest work had clearly been supported by focused research, detailed planning, attention to detail and a strong, sustained central concept based solidly on the requirements and details of the brief, as reflected in focused, unambiguous Statements of Intent. Such careful planning led to outcomes which demonstrated the verisimilitude required for the work to be marked in the higher levels; candidates clearly understanding the two forms they were working in. Such work showed higher levels of polish and, although the level of "finish" is perhaps not as central to the overall marking as it was for the legacy specification, the wording of the level 5 marking criteria still implies a certain level of quality ("sophisticated"; "highly developed"; "accomplished", etc.).
- Most candidates managed to explore the cross-media aspects of the briefs very well, with some excellent links being made between products. Considering that the products are each worth the same number of marks and that there is an obvious effect on the mark for digital convergence, it was to be hoped that a comparable amount of time would be spent developing both.
- The best coversheets included clear, bespoke, candidate-specific commentaries that referenced assessment criteria and cited examples from student work. This was particularly helpful where candidates had produced projects that took a counter-typical approach to the briefs. Less helpful CCSs lacked depth or detail - such an approach did not really help identifying why certain marks had been given; this was particularly evident with regard to digital convergence.
- The very best made clear links between the two main products and explained how digital convergence would connect the two. These also tended to go through the brief in depth, demonstrating how every requirement and detail was to be addressed.
- Although the statement is not assessed, it is an essential element of the assessment since it can clarify a candidate's thinking, particularly if an unconventional approach is to be taken either to the codes and conventions of the form or the representations being explored.
- At the upper end, there was a good understanding of the structural codes and conventions and the needs of the target audience were met through content and mode of address.
- Well-rehearsed performances were key to the successful outcomes (but the performers needed to retain a real and vital sense of enjoyment): this brief worked best when the appropriate presenter and performer casting had taken place; in one centre, candidates relied on the same two presenters; all the finished sequences were very different but all had the same confident performers in front of the camera. Casting is clearly something that is important to consider. Using a running banner at the bottom of the screen, with web address, Twitter and Instagram details, etc., was an effective wat of demonstrating understanding of digital convergence, as was having the presenters refer to the web and social media addresses and encouraging the audience to interact via them. Presenters were able to refer to the extra content on the websites (which candidates had actually produced and uploaded onto their sites).
- Generally, most pieces met the main requirements of the brief. However, some radio submissions were more like documentaries than music magazine programmes and others did not seem to fit a Radio 1 house style. Work that was not so successful usually involved a lack of the required production detail, but often showed missing key elements or weak technical skills that meant the codes and conventions were not demonstrated well. Weaker work tended to demonstrate one or more of the following:
- A lack of introduction to the concept of the show.
- Voices recorded either using poor quality microphones or the computer's built-in microphone resulting in distorted or low-level vocal tracks.
- Bed levels overpowering the vocal track (or conversely no bedding at all).
- Voices recorded at different levels.
- 'Phone-ins' where the phoned-in voice was clearly being recorded in the same room as the presenter.
- Shows with little or no editing.
- No candidate-created stings or jingles.
- A lack of sound effects or consideration of acoustic space.
- Pieces were long segments of dialogue focused on the same feature rather than covering a range of content.
- Where music was used, not fading this out after a few seconds (some pieces were heard which had more than 30 seconds of music; one ran for over two minutes of the three-minute piece).
- Pieces which sounded obviously scripted (and thus not particularly natural and so unsuited to the task).
- Representation was, perhaps, a challenge for many. Moderators were not sure that having presenters trying to 'put on an accent' was the answer to creating a range of representations.
- The stronger magazines chose their fonts with discrimination (not relying on standard body-text fonts to create sell lines or the masthead) and showed control in terms of size and leading. The best work used a variety of images on the contents, with page numbers on the images anchoring them to the written contents, and appropriately laid out and sized text.
- In general, the less successful magazines tended to miss key elements from the brief (including the production detail), did not adhere to the codes and conventions of the form or did not meet the conventional expectations of the genre.
- The best work demonstrated that candidates had understood the specific requirements of the brief relating to genre, representation, and industrial context and clearly researched this before planning their own pieces.
- In general, less successful music videos either missed key elements from the brief or did not adhere to the codes and conventions of the form.
Link to Website
Website
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UK Magazines: UK magazines are mainly based in London, though some publishing groups, such as Furture in Bath and DC Thompson in Dundee, are...
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Bauer Media Group is a German multimedia conglomerate headquartered in Hamburg. It operates worldwide and owns more than 600 magazines, ove...