Jude Rogers

I hope you enjoyed Jude Rogers' visit as much as I did. Aside from her celebrity revelations (!), I think she had some really useful advice for the coursework. Here are some of the notes I made, you might want to record your own thoughts on your own blog (hint!):

• Make interviews interesting by recording little details about how the subject answers, looks, eats, begins, behaves etc.
• Know your audience in terms of what information they need (NME readers know who Muse are, New Statesman readers probably won't), but that doesn't necessarily mean changing your personal writing style.
• The key for a good interview is being able to ask questions to a total stranger that will elicit something interesting about them that hasn't been written before.
• It's not a coincidence that almost all magazines have a main image of a person staring out at the reader.
• You don't have to limit yourself to a certain type of music, readers nowadays are more eclectic than they were 10 or 20 years ago.
• The importance of a good logo and title - single word, catchy etc.
• Ways the cover information draws in the reader - it doesn't need to be too clever.

Keeping blogs up to date

Just to help you so you don't get confused, by Friday you need the following posts on your blog:

• semiotic analysis of front cover
• comment/analysis of falling magazine sales
• analysis of Kerrang and NME articles
• case study of specific magazine - features, audience, font/size, use of imagery etc.

(all qualitative data)

Also it would be good if you have designed one survey using surveymonkey - a general one about readership of music magazines/online magazines. (quantitative data)

Where is your music magazine research?

Come on Year 12. I was expecting to log on and see you posting about music magazines. But none so far. We have a lesson tomorrow and I will need to see some evidence of your research on your blogs!

Last Year's Efforts

If you haven't already, make sure you spend a good amount of time trawling through last year's efforts. Go to fortismeremedia.blogspot.com and click on the different followers. The two covers above are particularly good and show quite a different approach to the task. What kind of reader do you think each magazine is aimed at? Think about fonts, titles, image, layout, language and use of magazine conventions.

Problems with followers

Make sure that when you are signing up to be a follower of this blog, you show the links to your two blogs: the school magazine and the music magazine. If you have already signed up, do this by clicking on your name as it appears in the followers list, then "site settings", then add links, and add your two blogs (they should appear as options) as the two links. If you are in the process of signing up, select "further options" as you are doing it and you are given the option to add links. Make sure it works by checking your two blogs appear when someone clicks on your follower image on the main blog.

Evaluation of School Magazine

Everyone in Mr. Strathdene's class needs to have completed their first evaluation of a school magazine cover by Tuesday 6th October and posted it to their blog. Make sure you add a picture to your posting. Make it look beautiful.

Be careful of losing your work. The safest thing to do is to type up your thoughts into a word document that you are saving and then copy and paste it into a blog post.

If you've chosen one of last year's magazines to evaluate, go to last year's site (fortismeremedia.blogspot.com) and get the image from there. The ones we looked at in class were Sameera's and Leila's.

Ms. Cunningham's class? Come on! Catch up!