The focus of Cosmopolitan is all about girls. Their make-up, relationships and sex advice. Most of the stories are real-life examples from readers writing in and talking about their experiences and then also professional experts, or doctors or lawyers or what have you, giving advice and sharing facts.
The articles are a mix of long and short, some all on one page but a few in each magazine are longer. Most of the magazine is actually all ads! At least 5 rip out ads, a few 'smell me' perfume ones, but mostly they are made up of clothes line pictures and advertisements. Total advertisements include, perfume, body-car, clothes, birth-control, make-up, hair products, and nail products.
The actual look of the magazine is 'LOOK AT ME!!' It is build of very flashy images and pictures are the bulk of the magazine. The trend is to have lots of bright colors and eye-popping attractive images or photo-shoped pictures. There is also a lot of subliminal advertising, such as an page that says, "Want a better Boyfriend? There is an app for that!" This clearly advertises Iphone and the App store from Apple.
They also have a lot of pictures of celebrities as a way of advertising just about anything related to the interests of the readers. They relate the items that a certain celebrity is wearing to the store you can buy tem and them what you can wear with it.
Between the print vs. online, one major difference is the ability to provide instant feedback online, vs sending a letter to the editor for print. It is faster and works better for todays culture on instant everything. Another difference is there are more quizzes and games online, although there are some in the magazine, there are more online, and you don't have to buy the issue to participate. The third main difference is the search-ability and the compactness of the online version. Online, you can search through many articles as simple as using Google, meanwhile it would take forever to search through a bunch of hard copies. It is also a lot more cumbersome to have a lot of magazines lying around, when they are all online.
Cosmo online here:
There is no other kind of magazine that comes close to being able to talk about such personal things such as sex and relationships advice and have the most make-up and fashion tips in one place. It is pretty much unrivaled in competition. It a teenage girls best friend.
The main point of the magazine is to talk about all the things we have listed above, however, that isn't how they draw in their readers. Readers are drew in by the constant big lettered preview of a story on the cover about something personal or sexy to either male or female. I would guess that about 90 percent of the time it is about sex.
Print has the advantage of mobility and at the same time being a hard physical copy, which some readers like better than reading on a computer. This can also be one of its' downfalls though since you have buy the physical copy while the online is free. Another downfall it that a physical copy can only contain a certain amount of information while online is unlimited. Online also can be bad because you must have interent to be able to access it, while anyone can get the the hard copy.
Target audience is primarily women in the range of 12 to 25. All the ads reflect this, as shown by the style of clothing and make-up and the relationship and sex advice is most of the time for the women's eyes only.
There are some offensive messages and stereotypes that play into Cosmo. Articles that condem men or assume certain things about them can be both. They can try and hit the generalizations, but not everyone is the same. It try's to get inside a man's head, but sometimes with limited success. Once such stereotypes is that all men are sex-driven all the time.
We prefer print better mainly for the same reason we still read books; we like the physical aspect to reading an article. While online can be helpful sometimes, the original magazine provides more of an experience than just going online.
Online better serves the audience because it not only allows the reader to read the original article but hen to see other peoples feedback as well. You can take what you read and then see more real-life examples to get the most out of what it is you came there to read for.
After reading this magazine it almost always sparks a conversation between friends or a significant other. The quizzes in the magazine area also a good way to interact with it.
With this assignment we observed the online copy more, and found more use to it for readers, but we both still prefer the hard copy. The magazine is still the primary way to read this type of article.
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