Bauer Media

Bauer Media

Introduction:

Founded in Hamburg in 1875, BAUER is an entertainment network built from multi-platform brands. These multi-platforms include digital, radio, TV and magazines. BAUER is currently in its 5^th generation of family ownership and is an international institution which is based in Germany and reaches many places including Poland, Australia, New Zealand the USA and the UK.

Conventions:

A convention shown on the first page is the navigation bar running across the top of the page off centre to the right. As you hover over one of the subcategories they are highlighted in a light blue colour and underlined in a different colour going in a pattern of dark blue, light blue, orange, purple, pink green, light blue, dark blue which brings a bit more colour to the blue themed page. The main theme of blue gives professional and well presented feel to the page.

A second convention is the search bar placed at the top right above the navigation bar. It makes the website easy to navigate and accessible

After clicking on the brands links, a convention used is a filter option. The filter bar gives the option to looks at magazines, radio, digital, TV or events. This is useful for anyone looking for something specific and is often used by multi-platform websites.

Text Genres:

Descriptive text is mainly used throughout the website. The opening page is very descriptive, informing readers about different articles which goes on to use narrative text.

 

Target Audience:

Their target audience is mass, appealing to males and females of all ages and sexuality as they work with brands appealing to them all. They have a broad range of brands and subcategories again making it appealing to a mass audience.

Magazine Textual Analysis

At the top of the page, the masthead, in capitals, reached across the page in bold red writing in a sanserif font "PRIDE".  The red writing draws attention which correlates nicely with the connotations of the word "PRIDE". Like Hall's theory suggests, the connotations of the word "PRIDE" are what makes up the meaning toward this magazine and represents the magazine as supportive of the British female African, African- Caribbean community.

Across the whole page is a photo of "Nicole Scherzinger" in a medium close shot. She's looking over the shoulder directly into the camera, a typical convention of magazines, whilst wearing a dark smokey eye and a bold red lip to match the masthead, giving the impression she is strong and powerful yet feminine and seductive; this again represents the magazine as supportive and empowering toward Africa, African- Caribbean women. The direct eye contact with the camera allows readers to believe she is strong and independent as she looks quite intimidating and femme fetal. The airbrushed finish to the photo would appeal to women and make then wonder how "Nicole Scherzinger outgrows her dolls" in hopes to become a powerful yet seductive woman like her.

Throughout the cover, there is a colour theme of red, black and yellow. This technical code represents the page in a distinctive way to make it project above the other magazines. The red matching Scherzingers lips and the black matching what she is wearing with yellow as a contrast colour makes the magazine very feminine yet noticeable and denotes it in a captivating way. There is also the use of white to pick out important text for example, the main feature on "Nicole Scherzinger" is printed in a white serif font. Like Barthes extension of the theory of the sign suggests, the denotation of these colours; bold red, yellow and black; along with the connotations; strength, hope and sophistication; created an eye catching cover with a large amount of meaning.

A technical code placed half way down the page on the right tells us the magazine is international " UK vs USA the land of opportunity debates. This allows us to understand that the magazine isn't only supportive of British African, African- Caribbean women but women around the world.