Free Magazines

In order to plan my final media product to the full capability, I will need to decided on small issues such as the cost of the magazine. As part of my research I chose to look into a series of free magazines and the conventions that many of them follow. I looked at: Crack, Loud and Quiet, Huck, DIY and BEAT. Many of these magazines fit into my genre of magazine excatly, and the others do not follow similar conventions.

Crack:   www.issuu.com/crackmagazine

Loud and Quiet:  www.issuu.com/loudandquiet

Huck: www.issuu.com/huckmagazine

DIY: www.diymag.com/magazine

BEAT: www.itsnicethat.com/articles/beat-magazine-1

When looking at examples of texts that fit into a genre similar to my own and are free, I realised that many of the conventions of this catergory are used very regularly. The first convention I found was the length and semantic meaning of the magazine titles. All of the titles are relevantly short (excluding Loud and Quiet, in which case even the two words are short and punchy). Another feature of the title is that all of the titles (excluding DIY and Huck) have some reference or semantic link to noise. I will look to follow similar conventions of these examples as I want to convey features to ensure my media product can be as realistic as possible.
Another convention that I have noticed is surrounding the strangely high numbers of borders used on magazine covers. In this genre many of the covers seem to have a white border surrounding their main cover image. I will certainly think about using this convention, yet I personally like magazines with a full cover (such as all of Crack's covers) as I believe the intensity of this makes the cover image more noticeable and stand out.
After researching this I believe that I will make my final product a free magazine. The majority of this market and genre is one that I want to emulate and therefore, to make sure I can do this, I will make my media product a free magazine. The logistics of this in a real life media product is difficult. As there is no paying customers, the magazine have to increase the amount of adverts to increase revenue enough to print the magazine. Another way free magazines raise this money is through creating merchandise and making companies have to pay for batch subscriptions.
I will look forward to creating a free magazine as I believe it gives me a greater expanse of styles to be inspired by.