Evaluation of Mercy Magazine Question 1!

1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and
conventions of real media products?
Above is a photograph of “The Source” magazine next to “Mercy” magazine which i created.

2. Masthead
Website
Dateline
Model credit
Main Model credit
Main cover line
Free gift
Main Image
Model credit
Model credit
Price
Barcode
Blackberry barcode

3. Main features
Title of contents
Cover
story
Editors note
Page numbers
Subscription
note

4. Images of main artist
Article
Pull quotes Columns
When creating my magazine I stuck to traditional hip hop magazine codes and
conventions as much as I could, and looked at other music magazines to set an example
for my own such as “Vibe” magazine. I made the style and layout of my music magazine
similar to that of other magazines of the same genre. For instance, on the front cover of
my magazine I used a large image of my main artist which took up a lot of the page
which didn’t cover the title because I the artist I was focusing on was an up and coming
artist and in other established magazines they had their artists in front of their masthead
partially covering it because the artists were already famous and made the brand of the
magazine more popular but because my artist is new and hardly anyone has heard of
him I made sure to make him the main focus but also make sure that the audience knew
it was a Mercy magazine, I borrowed this convention from various other magazines such
as Vibe and NME, which I had noticed often did the same thing. I decided to copy their
technique as I felt it created a big impact upon the target audience. The background
colour for the pages of my magazine was black because I wanted that to be one of my
main colours featured throughout the magazine along with yellow and white, as I
observed in other popular music magazines such as Q and Kerrang that it was common
for music magazines to have darker background colours for their pages and also have a

5. brighter colour added to their colour scheme to make the magazine stand out. I also
followed examples of other magazines in various additional aspects of my magazine
such as the way my headings were formatted and the way my text, photographs, and
captions were presented. However I challenged some conventions of real media
products through the use of one of my photographs. The majority of my photographs I
tried to make representative of the hip hop music genre but the one photo on my
double page spread of “ANTZ” smiling. This is really untraditional to see in a hip hop
magazine of a rapper because rappers are stereotyped to be angry, aggressive and
serious 24/7. In the made-up interview the made-up artist “ANTZ” mentioned his love of
music, how happy he is that he has starting to live his dream so the photograph of him
looking happy and content with himself and his life seemed logical to use.