Evaluation - Institutions

Institutions

What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?

Although my magazine would work on most institutions, I think it would work best on a bigger company such as Bauer Media Group or IPC Media. The audience is aimed at 16 to 29 year olds and many other music magazines reporting on a similar genre style and aimed at a similar audience are with a bigger company rather than smaller, individual ones or self-publishing.  The magazine however might need to start with a smaller publisher to start with to see where it would sit within the current market of music magazines, as it would probably be closely compared to magazines such as NME and a younger Q magazine. The advantages of being published by bigger companies who own many magazines is that they have a lot of connections to other companies involved in the media industry that would be able to get involved in the magazine. They also have a lot more money to invest in the magazine and its content to appeal to a broader audience while still making the readers feel like they’re in a small group and that the magazine is personalized to them. As well as it being ideal for the audience, belonging to a bigger institution would make it a lot easier to advertise as more companies would be willing to pay more for their products to be advertised in the magazine as normally, bigger magazine companies produce magazines with a bigger audience although there are some exceptions like ‘Clash’ Magazine who are self-publishing but still have circulation of around 50,000 which is very successful considering the rising use of the internet.

Although smaller publishing companies are ideal for niche magazines covering a certain area of a topic, I don’t think it would be ideal for my magazine after a long period of time as my magazine doesn’t single out a large majority of people because it reports on acts and festivals which are quite well known so even a new reader not interested in that genre of music will still be able to understand and recognise some of the content. It is very hard for a magazine that is published by a small company to get recognised enough and wouldn’t be sold in high street stores or supermarkets, normally it would need to be ordered online or found in a shop that very clearly links with the topic or specialized in selling magazines published by these companies.

By self-publishing a magazine, it can be very risky, which would explain why only a very small number of magazines do this. Although it does have many advantages such as the owner of the magazine having all rights over the magazines name and content as well as having bigger revenue when sold and having total control over production costs, there are many disadvantages, especially if the magazine does not have the success the owner predicts. As the magazine is responsible for the expenses such as cost of creation and printing, it needs to be sure that it will get the money back as well as enough profit for the business to run successfully as well as also being responsible for marketing and promotion. If the magazine is being sold in a high street store or supermarket, they usually expect 10 to 15% of the recommended retail price as well as the retailer returning any unsold products which is going to cost the company more. With my magazine, I don’t think this either would be a responsible way of publishing until I had least known my distribution and circulation numbers as well as how much profit I would make with the expenses of producing the magazine being taken out.

Although I think distributing in supermarkets much as ASDA or Sainsbury might not be the best solution, being sold in shops like WHSmith’s would be ideal as they distribute a lot of magazines from a variety of genres with a range of different populaties. My magazine, being similar to NME and Q would be positioned in the store next to them which would make it more likely that one of their readers would buy it and it would have a better chance of having a bigger circulation than being sold online or in an independent store.