Ideal Readers of Heat and Time Magazines - Essay Example

News and Entertainment of Disparate Means: A Semiotic Study of Heat and Time Magazines Andrew Goffey Sophia Drakopoulou and Alex Lockwood Magazines—JCM3000 January 4, 2006 One is 191 pages, the other 156. One features, in the first ten pages, centered and simple contents; a wedding photo album of Jordan and Peter Andre (though the photos are of Matt Lucas and David Walliams—of Little Britt—as sneering and giddy bride and groom); adverts for perfume, hair colour, jewels, DVDs, and shampoo; happy Xmas cards from celebs to readers; and words like “fart” and “fuck”. The other contains in the first ten pages a table of contents (with summaries); ads for autos, insurance, clothing, watches, three for a major credit card (with a bio page from Ken Watanabe, Ellen Degeneres, Kate Winslett, and a blank bio page for readers); and letters from readers to the editors. One magazine is entertainment with the latest celeb news, the other news with occasional inserts on entertainment. One is Heat magazine, the other is Time. One is cheeky, ironic, punchy, fun; the other is serious, driven, dramatic, and dry. Much money soaks the magazine publishing market. And much is poured into increasing the pounds and dollars—with research, analysis, and aggressive sales efforts. Of the latter, with investments on the part of magazine publishers, a predominant sum goes to studying readership demographics. Such studies, which include reader usage measure (RUM), reveal determinations of attitudinal and behavioral characteristics of public place readers (magazine.org), means through which readers obtain such a magazine, degree of involvement with the magazine, and levels of satisfaction with specific magazine elements. These studies, then, determine—among many factors—who and what the target audience is. A composite readership profile exists for every such periodical. Given these facts, and based on semiotic analysis of two specific issues—both special editions—of Heat and Time, this paper will profile the targeted reader, the signifé (signifier) Adopting the theories of semiotics, this paper will additionally work with the approaches that hold that categories within the two periodicals (as phenomena) are indispensable to the analysis of the way literature can produce feeling (Pierce)—and in the case of advertising (textual and pictorial) can instill or appeal to desire (to sell magazines and material goods). This will be accomplished in two contexts, the images and the texts—in the same regard as semioticist Roland Barthes addresses the concerns of language not as representing reality but signifying it (1957, 1970), making the job of the critic that of analysing the semiological value (1957, 1970); and in the manner in which Saussure establishes the components of a signifying system, the significant and the signifé (signifier), as dictating the meanings of the whole (1993). The similarities the two publications share, beyond the intention to draw readership and sell product, that is, are seemingly few: each is a deliberately chosen “special” issue (Heat a double Xmas issue and Time a special issue featuring the best photos of 2005); each informs (Heat announces celebrity comments, actions and activities, while Time reports politically related comments, actions and activities); and each uses advertising (images and text) by way of connoting or encoding what is understood in semiotic terms as favourable actions of signs to offer iconic and linguistic representation of ideology that appeals to and/or agrees with, at some level, targeted readership. SIGNIFICANT—HEAT MAGAZINE After near financial ruin, the Heat team re-invented the publication, as Ruth Addicott reports, aiming to deliver a signified concept that followed the logic, “the higher the I.Q., the greater the need for gossip” (2002). Heat is an insider’s view of what the film and TV stars really do and say and who they really are. No image is too telling; no story is too precious: their lives are exposed and commented upon by the magazine writers with a British ideology of poetic and prosaic justice, with sharp sarcasm, and with ironic wit. SIGNIFIER—HEAT MAGAZINE READER The Heat-targeted younger, hipper woman is the reader of this publication that champions reality TV shows, grandstands favourite put-downs of celebrities it at the same time esteems, and embraces reader sentiment. The average age of the signifier appears to range to almost arbitrary proportions: the 20-something will delight in images of Kirsten Dunst losing her swim top on holiday in St. Barts’ swim. The 30-year-old will have a laugh at such a caption, which includes a snarky “Well, what does she expect when she wears a headband as a bikini top?” (2005) And the 40- and 50-year-olds will engage in the implications of the featured Shayne Ward’s title comment, “Iv’e slept with an older woman before [and] it was great!” text that takes up one third of the centerfold pages, next to an emblematic life-sized poster on (connotatively pinned to) a living room wall. The reader is female, latching onto the “Breaking News” (2005) of Big Brother 6 winner Anthony Hutton snogging with ladies, laughing at the worst dressed celebrities (and the captions); heeding the warnings and wisdom of exercise gurus (and ads featuring photos of women), film critics, and fashion fanatics (and ads featuring images of young, perky, sexy—and successful lovers, champion skaters, models, actresses, and mates). The reader is successful and smart. She can afford the items in the adverts, objects representing notions of uniqueness (one-of-a-kind watches), can make use of sofa (depicting a sleeping/smiling woman in an image over the text, “think sofas, think dfs [logo]”). The reader is indulgent. She appreciates the hint of wild strawberry in Cravendale milk, the sparkle of loads of haute couture and bling for the advert that is actually about Archers’ Schnapps, the fragrances and jewels that signify hot-ness, charm, shine, humour, wishes, and dreams. The reader is nurturing, maternal, biologically wired for empathy, sympathy, caring: she will swoon over Angelina Jolie’s pilfered (?) mate, Brad Pitt, but she will stay on the pages of Ange rubbing noses with her adopted son, Maddox. She will have sincere concern for alopecia survivor Gail Porter, who is depicted realistically, with two-thirds of her head hairless; she will draw on the instinct to survive and protect the brood with Sheila’s Wheels—car insurance by women and for women; and she will at some level buy into a self-effacing womanness when asked the question, “Are you a noodlehead?” by the bright orange, yellow, and green smiley face fork of noodles ad. And the reader has an esthetic bent that is honored by the magazine: with a keen ironic sensibility, she understands the gritty underbelly of the glamour and glitz—appreciating the same magazine that takes Paris Hilton as a sponsor (advertising her new fragrance with a sexy, sleek, beautiful doorway posing Paris in fairy tale meets flapper powder blue sheer dress) also spares nothing in mocking Hilton in a two-paged photo spread which depicts a bewigged Paris sitting in a queue of wig forms that bears the header, “Paris, You Dummy!” “There is,” says Heat Deputy Editor Julian Linley, who is quoted by journalist Ruth Addicott, “a much better sense of irony in the U. K.. Americans like celebs that are glamorous and lead fantasy lives. In the U.K. we much prefer our celebs to be a bit more real” (2002). SIGNIFICANT—TIME MAGAZINE Celebs of a different type and different import make the composite content of the news-focused magazine, Time. The periodical, a weekly publication that offers itself as an important resource for state, local, and national and international news, presents as significant more text (and sociopolitical context) than Heat. It also offers images, but images that are photojournalistic “winners”—those which depict the seriousness or capture the sobriety of a moment in time. As opposed to the fiery pinks and cheerful or sultry reds and blues and hues of Heat, the images are often black and white or subtler toned renderings of medical workers distributing great blocks of ice to cover and preserve the hundreds of decaying bodies of tsunami victims in Takuapa, Thailand; of evacuated Katrina victims; of a shattered London bus and broken July 7 bombing victims. And Time, while also investing in semiotic language and images that impel, uses advertisement--as a commodity code that is intended to sell by way of a stabilization, a dialectical balancing of the signifier and the signified that preys on the signifier just as boldly if not more subtly. SIGNIFIER—TIME MAGAZINE READER The Time-targeted reader likely agrees that the publication is the “Reader’s Digest of news magazines” (Amazon, 2004). Also a woman (though almost unisexed, with 10% more women than men reading Time), the reader is [usually] educated, in her forties, and relatively successful (making an average income, that is, of 50-60,000 USD annually). This empathetic and concerned for the world and nation reader seeks not the gratification, necessarily, of reading about stars, but rather seeks the depth and breadth of political (left-leaning) analytical reportage of the vindication of an FBI-detained “fiery pro-Palestinian university professor;” the future of Arab democracy—as conceived through Egyptian fundamentalists; the attempts on the part of a Republican president who initiated a controversial war to reverse his second-year slump and boost his “anemic approval ratings” (2005) The reader takes value in the two pages of Milestones, pages that note and honor the birth, death, or wedding in much the way a column in a paper might. The reader is a busy professional who takes notes on the business section and finds leisure appeal in the entertainment section, where she updates her must-read repertoire or measures the critical opinion of a movie reviewer against the popularity of genre and box office results. Lured to the personalized approach of the “Your Time” section, the reader is a health-conscious trend-follower who takes in the information on the latest fitness techniques, which are “workouts she can download;” the coolest cocktails, offered in the cocktail catalogs and itemized drink pricelists (with Louis XII cognac going for USD 1,400); and the latest and most economical decorating, furnishing, or lodging trends (which are categorized by continent—squeezed onto one half a page). Impacted by the newsworthiness and aesthetics of images made by top photographers, the reader is drawn by signs of contextualised iconography—by New Orleans’ Garden District, flooded and burning; by a two page spread of flood waters in Elysian Fields (with a touch on the irony of the name in the caption), where in the center of a deserted town lay a dead man, face down in six inches of water. And the reader is one who is interested enough in reading a discussion of the fundaments of how the eye registers such imagery, in blurbs and intros—which contextualize and purport to clarify meaning of individual significants included in the larger significant, the magazine--though she is not necessarily aware of how the majority of the text is slanted, how it encompasses the magazine, or how the adverts, often larger than or as spatially consumptive as the smaller sections and offerings, bear a representative quality (both textually and imagistically) that often outweighs the semiotic value of the news contents. The adverts in Time as much as or more than the news bytes and articles a connotative messaging system that exacerbates the role of the magazine as providing shared values of both producer (significant) and user (signified), the reader of such advertisement is one who emphasizes (unconsciously) cultural expectations…which she brings to the experience of reading. She is targeted by a publication that is savvy about this, a magazine that provides the relevant textual and imagistic content that will register. The reader, then, is familiar with contextualised: in her lifetime, she or someone close to her will buy one of the vehicles set up in disproportionately and glossy two-page spreads to appeal to her need for ease of shopping (one such advert features expensive to print cardboard page of removable stickers in the shape of gift tags, each with a select auto on it), her—or his--hopes for larger and more (as advertised for the “all new bigger RAV4”), and her yen for best, most comfortable, and most innovative (offered repeatedly in an advert for Ford Explorer 2006). The reader is sympathetic to or empathizes with the connotated communication. She is sensitive to those with physical or mental problems, as she takes in the two-paged ad with one image (of a simply dressed but seemingly needful woman looking out across waving wheat fields) and one full page of text that is headed, in large font, with the line, “disorder takes understanding…”). She is patriotic in her empathy toward fellow countrymen: Bill O’Reilly, political pundit, stares out at her with a caption that reads, “America is in the no-spin zone.” And the reader is in direct identification with some or most of the advertorial nature of the adverts in the magazine. She will or has already purchased life, health, home, and auto insurance; she uses three or four credit cards, that care about her life by offering her—after three pages of celebrity credit card information—her own page of blanks to fill in, for her favourite this and that’s; and she needs or uses or will need or use—for her or someone in her life—medication (four technical pages of pills in one issue), sneakers (Addidas), technology (Intel), and any number of pragmatic and related products. CONCLUSION A Magazine Reader Experience Study, by the Media Management Center of Northwestern University, surveyed the following variables: whether the magazine under scrutiny is relevant/useful; whether or not the reader likes some of the ads; if the reader wants more information; if the magazine helps reader improve and try new things; whether he/she relates to the ads, reads the ads, and/or dislikes the ads; and the overall attitude toward or opinion of the magazine. (2003) At a deeper ideological and imagistic level, however, surveys seek to find evidence of success of variables the readers are not made privy to. That is, while readers are aware of what they like (what is appealing, interesting, entertaining, informative), they may not know why. They are likely not consciously cognizant of anything beyond the complementary relationship—in the simplest of terms—between image and text. Rather, it is the publication that is aware of and makes use of what Sausseure deemed the arbitrariness of internal sign-relation (1910, 1993); and the publication in turn manipulates that relationship to its end. In the overall, the inherent expectation embedded in the significant (the publication) is that the signifier (the reader) will identify—intellectually and emotionally—with the content and context…whether he or she is conscious of the process of identification or not. That process, of course, exposed and expressed in Heat and Time as entertainment, as news, as information…but also, at some relevant level, as engaging, copy-selling gossip--celebrity or political powerhouse or otherwise. References (2005, December 17-30) Heat. 193 pages. (2005, December 19) Time. 156 pages. Addicott, Ruth. Turning up the Heat ina Celeb-Saturated U. K. – Heat Magazine. LookSmart. http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/ mi_m3065/is_11_31/ai_94012291 (2002, November 1). Barthes, Roland. (1970). Mythologies. Paris: Seull. Chandler, Daniel. (1995) Semiotics for Beginners. http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/S4B/semiotic.html. Digital Spy. (2005, June 12). Chico in Heat discussion. http://forum.digitalspy.co.uk/board/showthread.php?t=312790 (2005, December 10). Magazine Publishers of America. (2005) The Value of Magazine Readership. http://www.magazine.org/content/Files/ FINAL% 20Value% 2Dof%2DReadership%2DWP%2D9.pdf Pierce, Charles S.. (1868). On a New List of Categories. Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 7. http://www.peirce. org/writings/p32.html (2005, December 10). Review Centre. (1999-2005). Heat Reviews. http://www. reviewcentre.com/reviews9601.html Sausseure, Ferdinand de. (1993). Third Course of Lectures on General Linguistics, 1910. New York: Pergamon Press. Read More