Reflection of Production and Practice by Olivia Watson

Reflection of production and practice C3496523 Olivia Watson Word Count: 968

The production of a magazine is a lot more complex than people would imagine, there are so many different and important roles that go into magazine production for it to be successful. Senic (2011) suggests six steps to follow when producing a custom magazine and these are: 1. Create a production schedule 2. Create a content plan 3. Create a detailed plan for each story 4. Proofread and edit stories 5. Design 6. Checking Again, these are for a custom magazine which I believe Spoiled Nation is.

For the production of our magazine we were all given the choice of, each week, submitting a piece of print content or an online entry and each week we had two editors for print, and two for online. When we first began to write for Spoiled Nation, I don’t think we all really knew what the content of the magazine was going to include because we all have different strengths and weaknesses in different areas of writing. There are some of us that prefer to do interviews and others that want to write more commercially. Before Senic (2011) explained those six points, he wrote that before you even begin these points, that you would need to think about your pre-defined target audience throughout the production of the magazine. If you do not have your target audience in mind whilst producing pieces of writing for them to read, you could easily begin writing and produce content for the wrong audience.

Editorial and digital platforms In an article by Fletcher (2012), he explains how a majority of magazines and newspapers can be located online as well as in print form and some had even began to move to social media to reach all target audiences. Society today are a lot more technically advanced than they were seven years ago, so it is not a shock when we find out that a lot more magazines have followed this route and have moved their publications to online as well as print, and some even moving to online altogether. Glamour magazine in 2017 chose to abandon their monthly print edition in favour of a ‘digital first’ strategy and decrease the production of their print publication to bi-annually (Jackson, 2017).

Jackson (2017) wrote that according to PrintwaterhouseCoopers, that the combined revenues of combined cover sales and advertising for the UK’s magazines have fallen by 8% since 2012 from £2.4bn to £2.2bn. The production of magazines like Glamour who’s pages are full of fashion, lifestyle and gossip for women to browse has had to make the decision of focusing primarily on an online version, but not all magazines have had to make this choice with Jackson (2017) explaining current-affairs magazines such as the Economist have seen an upward trajectory. The production of a magazine, like Senic (2011) explained has to be relevant to a target audience and although Glamour do reach their target audience, they cannot compare with blogs and other online services that provide the same content, which has resulted in their print production being cut short and their online production being a big success and meeting the needs of their readers. However in a survey, Pilcher (2018) that out of 1226 people, when asked how many digital magazines they had read, 54.6% of people said they hadn’t read one.

Reflection of Spoiled Nation’s production I found the production of both the print and online really enjoyable, I got to be an editor for print one week and being able to take control of the magazine and see how people produce their own pieces of work and the variation of content there was. It also gave everyone an opportunity to write and produce for both print and online. At level five some of us chose to focus on editorial and some on new media so for all of us it was an opportunity to try out a new way of writing. Spoiled Nation, like any other magazine has a house style that we needed to stick to when producing our print and online content and we had a few discussions about it, the online house style was questioned but we kept with the original as it was a neutral style and because the content online was that of such a variety that it worked well. Like every other magazine, there was a weekly editor that oversaw and finalised all the submissions and content ready for publication. Spoiled Nation because of the widespread ideas of the writers, does not lack in variety in its content which is important for a magazine because if the same content was being produced weekly, it would not be a successful production of a print or online magazine. Touching subjects such as fashion, mental health, travel, interviews with small and big business people, opinion pieces and music.

Reflection of practice At level five I practiced editorial writing, the programme used to create our print content is InDesign which is not one of my strong points so when given the chance to try and write for online for Spoiled Nation I was interested to see what the difference between the two was. Online content is a smaller piece of writing that means you can write more than one, whereas when you read a piece of content in a print publication, it holds a lot more content.

A magazine could do a six-page spread for one specific story, online would make that into six smaller posts. For the social media side, it was an opportunity to see what content people uploaded onto the platforms; Instagram and Twitter. I think it is important today for magazine publications to be able to stretch their content to all platforms, every reader is different and to reach a maximum target audience you have to meet the needs of everyone.

Bibliography

• Fletcher, M. (2012). Sector Analysis: Magazines. [online] Campaignlive.co.uk. Available at: https://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/sector-analysis-magazines/1119858 [Accessed 7 Jan. 2019].

• Jackson, J. (2017). As Glamour goes “digital first”, what does the future hold for magazines?. [online] Newstatesman.com. Available at: https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/media/2017/10/ glamour-goes-digital-first-what-does-future-hold-magazines [Accessed 7 Jan. 2019].

• Pilcher, D. (2018). Print vs. Digital: How We Really Consume Our Magazines – 2018 edition. [online] Freeport Press. Available at: http://freeportpress.com/print-vs-digital-how-we-really-consumeour-magazines/ [Accessed 8 Jan. 2019].

• Senic, N. (2011). Producing a Custom Magazine? Follow These 6 Content Marketing Steps. [online] Content Marketing Institute.

Available at: https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2011/08/6steps-for-producing-a-custom-magazine/ [Accessed 7 Jan. 2019].