Magazine Cover Review

         My initial reaction to recognizing the themes of colors that play into stereotypes was surprised. Magazines like Cosmopolitan and GQ are great examples of this. Cosmopolitan played into the stereotype of women loving pink and doing “girly” things. Their cover page displayed this through their color scheme of white and pink text, and they have statements about heels, nails, and other things that fit into the stereotype of women. GQ’s cover page has white and blue text with very straightforward statements. These play into the stereotype of men. They use these stereotypes and celebrities to target a certain audience. Magazines that do this are Men’s Journal and Vogue. Men’s Journal uses a photo of celebrity Patrick Dempsey to attract men that can be from age 20-60. Vogue magazine has Rhianna on the cover, who is a huge superstar, which attracts many women. These celebrities attract these audiences because many people idol them and want to hear what they have to say. Whoever is on the cover usually has a feature article, which is set up a certain way for the magazine’s audience. I noticed that men’s magazines, such as Men’s Health, had featured articles that are full of text and not spaced out. The Oprah magazine contrasts and has the text spaced out more, which seems to be a constant theme in more women magazines than in men's magazines. This may be due to differences in how men and women read or maybe due to age differences.

         The article, “Chances are you won’t bother to read this article. …"by Michael Scherer, goes in depth on the topic of shortening attention spans. The article explains the theory that people attention spans are getting shorter every generation and how that effects readership of magazines. I never realized how little my peers and I read magazines and no wonder magazines are getting fewer young readers. I believe many magazines are picking up on this and shortening articles and putting in more pictures. Cosmopolitan has a younger target audience and that is probably the reason for their large photos with a small amount of text for the feature article. Another thing the article brought to my attention is how many magazines have stuck to their roots of long articles, such as Men’s Health. Many magazines don’t believe attention span are shortening. James Kaminsky, editor of Playboy, claims that it “is one of those theories that has been in the air” and plans on disproving this theory by continuing with Playboy’s long stories. Magazine readership may not even be going down due to attention span, but instead caused by increasing lack of time people seem to have these days. Although the readership is decreasing, I believe in David Remnick’s theory that there will always be readers for quality pieces of journalism. 

*INCLUDE THE ROLE THESE ELEMENTS PLAY IN DEVELOPING THE INTEREST OF NEW AUDIENCES, 

CULTIVATING BRAND LOYALTY,  AND SECURING ADVERTISING DOLLARS. 

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