Identifying Your Audience

It is important to identify your audience – and thereby your potential market – so that your magazine can be designed, promoted and distributed with that in mind.

There are two major categories of magazine:

• Consumer magazines. These are aimed at individuals in the market for products, services or information.
• Business to business (B2B) magazines. These are aimed at organisations wishing to know about the offerings of other organisations.

It should be apparent which of these categories your magazine falls into, although some magazines can serve both purposes.

There are also several groups of magazine readers, for example:

• Associates. This includes friends, family, work colleagues, and so forth – people who are generally close contacts of the magazine’s producers.
• Members of an organisation. These are people within an established body, for example a club, association, professional body, business network or ‘virtual’ organisation. With most of these, people tend to meet face to face, but with virtual organisations, members generally communicate with each other by electronic means and do not have a physical workplace or other venue that they all attend regularly.
• People within a geographical area. This could be a village, a town, a county, a region, a country or an international area.
• People in a ‘functional’ area. This includes people who have something in common. They may share the same work sector – for example, engineers or hairdressers; engage in the same social activity – such as attendance at a leisure centre or a gardening club; be at a similar career stage – for example, school leavers or the self-employed, and so forth.
• The general public. This is a readership composed of anyone who is interested in the topic of the magazine, regardless of any of the above groupings.

It is worth considering each of the above categories and then deciding which of them apply to your own magazine. You can have several categories of reader, but do be careful not to make your desired readership too broad – if you try to appeal to the whole world, the chances are that you will lose focus, and potential readers will not understand why your publication is relevant to them.

Once you have determined your potential readers, you will have some idea of the potential size of your market; you can then decide whether to produce your publication for the whole of your market or to restrict the circulation size for financial or other reasons.

Considering Principles, Values And Ethics

People differ in their interpretations of the words ‘principles’, ‘values’ and ‘ethics’ – to my mind, principles are guides to action, values are the things that are important to a person and ethics are the codes of morality which people follow. You will probably have your own definitions of each of these concepts and you may simply think the terms are interchangeable. Whatever your opinion regarding the words themselves, there are a number of issues that result from the application of these concepts.

Together, these concepts are factors that govern the ways in which an activity is carried out and, in producing your magazine, you will probably find it helpful to explore your own beliefs about each of them, and the implications that follow from these beliefs.

Of course, the words themselves do not carry any inbuilt positive or negative connotations: a person can act from very commendable principles, yet the actions taken may have appalling consequences. In this chapter, however, I will assume that you wish to adopt principles, values and ethics that lead to beneficial results.

If this is the case, you may like to spend a little time considering which principles, values and ethics are involved in your desire to produce your magazine and in its actual production; for example:

Some principles might be:

• to ensure balance in reporting and writing
• to allow a ‘right of reply’ to material printed
• to provide space for minority opinion

Some values might be:

• to produce a high quality product
• to remain independent in thinking and writing
• to maintain open communications between people involved

Some ethical stances might include:

• not printing incorrect, embarrassing, misleading or damaging material
• not accepting inducements to print material
• not publicly criticising competing publications

When you are clear about this kind of issue, you will find it much easier to decide on particular courses of actions and put your day-to-day activity into a broader, more significant, context.