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.

Industrial Context: Magazine Industry

UK Magazines:

UK magazines are mainly based in London, though some publishing groups, such as Furture in Bath and DC Thompson in Dundee, are based in other cities. The Periodical Publishers Association represents 400 publishers operating in Britain, accounting for 2,300 consumer, business, and professional magazines - 80% of the UK magazine market by turnover. There are 8,000 titles published in Britain and they can be categorised in these sectors:

1. Consumer (general and specialist) sold in newsagents.
2. Business/Trade/Professional/B2B - for people at work.
3. Cosumer Publishing/Contract Publishing/Custom - produced by publishing agencies for organisations to give to their customers as a form of marketing.
4. Staff Magazines - produced by a company's internal communications team or a publishing agency to inform staff about their company.
5. Newspaper Supplements are free with a daily or Sunday paper.
6. Part Works - a set number of issues builds up into an 'encyclopedia' on a specific topic.
7. Academic Journals - for university-level discussion of all sorts of arcane topics.

Consumer Magazines:

Consumer magazines make up the bulk of the titles for sale in Britain's newsagents. They may be general titles that aim to entertain and inform (such as GQ, Elle, Radio Times) or consumer specialist titles aimed at a specific interest or hobby (Car, Total Film, Gardeners' World). THere are about 2,800 UK consumer magazines.

The biggest consumer magazine publishers (by newsagent sales revenue):

• 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%

Most UK magazines for consumers - 90% - are sold by newsagents or supermarkets. Smiths News, owned by Connect Group, is the biggest distributor with a 55% share of the UK market. It delivers 35 million newspapers and 11 million magazines to 30,000 retailers each week. The UK is more reliant on newsagent sales than the US and continental European countries, where subscriptions dominate.

Total sales of such magazines have been falling since 1960 (with far fewer titles) as the role of magazines and newspapers as the main purveyor of information and entertainment was usurped by television. Firgures from the Advertising Association put total sales at 2,100 million in 1992. However, there was a rise to 1,399 million copies in 2004 before dropping back to 1,000 million by 2017. Overall, sales are falling at 5% a year.

Launches in the past ten years have numbered 421-02 annually, according to WHSmith.

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.

Audience Research: Audience Profile

Audience Research: Audience Moodboard

 

Audience Research: Focus Group

Brief 3: Magazines and Online

 

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.

Application of Assessment Criteria:

• 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.

Statements of Intent:

• 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.

Brief 1: Television and Online

• 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).

Brief 2: Radio and Online

• 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.

Brief 3: Magazines and Online

• 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.

Brief 4: Music Video and Online

• 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.