Are you an A-LEVEL beauty?

Why does a media product exist?

- The only reason a media product will ever exist, is to make money. 

Approximately thirty percent of magazine revenue comes from advertisement. This means that seventy percent comes from cover price and sales. The target audience for "Woman" magazine, is a mass audience of 40+ women.

How did IPC get to the top?
They became a conglomerate and therefore became more powerful. They achieved this by buying all of their competitors.

However, if one major company owns majority of things within a sector, it means that they have a monopoly. This gives them a lot of money and power. This means they can manipulate their audience and sector of the market. But it allows for standardised products being made.

"Media concentration limits variety, creativity and quality."

The corona virus is a moral panic, aka "a media panic", it is blown out of proportion. Most media products are going on about this, because a lot of people will buy it. Actually, flu is more dangerous, but corona is made to seem more dangerous because of how much it's been blown out of proportion.

Woman magazine presents a pre-war ideology.

A-LEVEL BEAUTY ARTICLE

• The choice of wording is simplistic, this helps to target their audience, who are not to a high-level of intelligence.
• The use of non-sophisticated lexis.
• There are a lot of rhetorical questions. These are blunt in a direct mode of address.
• Is trying to teach the audience to be a certain way, it is scoring people.
• The article asks, are you an 'A-LEVEL' beauty, because it's understandable for a wider audience, opposed to are you a 'degree-level beauty'. By comparing the audience to a school level qualification, taken by teenagers, it positions them as being teenagers and therefore not ready to face the outside world. This is degrading and diminutive.
• The idea that you are doing this quiz, is childish.
• The use of the lexis, 'tactics', makes life seem like a game.
• They address the audience as 'girls', which degrades them to be younger. In relation to the target audience, 40+ women, by making them seem childish, is patronising. This is infantilisation, where you turn the audience into younger people.
• "A-Level" suggests that the audience should look young, just like eighteen year olds who sit the exams. This is suggesting that older people cannot be good looking.
• The men are benefiting from this, because it means that women will lack self-confidence, this retains the power within men, and does not allow women to have any.
• The lexis, 'tactics' suggests that going after a man is like a battle. It creates the narrative, that as a woman you need to fight to get a man.
• This reinforces Lisbet Van Zoonen's theory that women are a spectacle.
• Society would mostly agree with this, and this is meant to be the 'right' reading.
• This reinforces the notion of patriarchal hegemony

To what extent is the regulatory framework of magazines in the UK effective?

• IPSO regulate magazines in the UK.
• Magazines are more gossip, and deal with far-less controversial information in comparison to a newspaper. That is why people don't care as much about the regulations. (general public).
• For this question, you could argue that woman magazine was easy to regulate, because there was no access to the internet. Nowadays, digital technology makes news harder to regulate.
• Woman magazine is not innocent, it is manipulative and uses language and lexis in order to reinforce patriarchal hegemony, yet because IPSO have no rules against this, nothing can go against them.