Concept Refinement

After getting my concept for the magazine together, it was time to pitch it to my classmates and get their feedback. Everything about my magazine, and some ideas that could be added to my concept, is shown on this chart. 

The main complaint about the concept, from my peers, was that it was too specific and boring. Not that the feature were boring, but it just didn't seem like something someone would come across and pick it up at first glance. The only way to fix that is to make the concept much broader so that audiences of different interests would be interested in my animal magazines. Another idea is to find ways for pet owners to want to interact with their own pets. My peers made it clear to push these ideas through the cover of the magazine because that is what people see first when they are looking to read a magazine. According to Nick Bezuidenhout in his article, "Magazine publishing trends for 2019", he states that, "... magazines have already branched out into events to expose new people to their brand and to foster more loyalty... This also increases the number of touchpoints that magazines have with their readers, which enables them to know the audience even better." Clearly getting a bigger audience is the best way to go with this magazine. Magazine author Mensah Demary also supports this claim. In the article, "The Abundance, Joy, Beauty, Persistence, Power, and Potential of Independent Publishing: A CONVERSATION WITH SIX BLACK EDITORS.", Demary states that, "It's important to be in tune with the interests and conversations of readers who gravitate toward certain books while articulating their desires for greater literary representation, not only in who is published, but in ideas and perspectives." I feel that if we try to emulate on pet owners in our articles while expanding to broader audiences, it would have the effect that Demary has found to be substantial in magazines. 

So what changes in my concept to meet these ideas? The most notable change would be in how I carry out the cover of the magazine. Because this project only allows for one feature article, cover page, and table of contents, I find that it would be hard to implement these changes with this small amount of space other than the cover. The cover was originally going to have only one picture of an animal, probably a dog, with the article titles going around it. Now, the idea is to have the animal with a person to try to emulate pet owners. Some of the articles around the picture could have articles that expand into the psychological aspect of pets. This would hopefully open the audience to people who are psychologists or a part of mental health awareness. it will broaden the audience and hopefully have people see the connection between them and their pet, if they have one.