Media essay

Media essay on Men’s Fitness magazine front cover

The left third on the front cover shouts out all of the things that a stereotypical man would be interested in: losing weight, gaining muscle, and how to improve your sex life. The first thing that the customer will notice on the left third is the ‘lose your gut!’ segment. This will be the bit of text that the customer will see first and therefore makes it the most important segment in the front cover. Using the theme of black and white, the red text stands out even more thus catching the reader’s eye when scanning over the cover. The left third is a mixture of different shades of black, white and grey with the odd slash of red. Although these seem as dull colours, the different shades stand out. This association of masculine magazines to the different shades and red suggests the motto of ‘blood, sweat and tears’ the blood being the red text and the sweat and tears being the shades.

It could be suggested that the wording in the left and right thirds make the puff as well as the plug. The large text acts as the puff by attracting the customer’s attention. For example the text in the left third is worded and edited in this way to make it sound like someone is ordering you to ‘lose your gut.’ the centre third of a muscly Hugh Jackman adds to the intimidation of your look and makes you want to start losing weight. The use of the word ‘gut’ suggests that the magazine is aimed at the working class as it’s a casual and informal phrase to place in big bold letters on the front cover. The large numbers in the right third are another example of a puff. The large numbers attract the attention and the text around the puff is the information causing the large number. Usually, on men’s magazines, the numbers shown on the cover are large. This is because men want big; big muscle, big popularity and a big sex life. Another reason to include large numbers is because bigger number come across more impressive; if there was a huge number 3 on the cover it would look less appealing, (unless it was ‘3 ways to lose weight’ or something along those lines) whereas, a huge number ‘76’ on the cover looks much more appealing to the customers, especially if the men are trying to look impressive.

The genre of the magazine is obvious. It is a very masculine based magazine with a very masculine title: ‘men’s fitness.’ The title uses the word man instead of ‘male’ or ‘boy’ because the word ‘man’ has many conventional expectations to it, such as: muscle, ladies, cars, football, other sports and beer. However, the word ‘male’ has too much of a variety too it and ‘boy’ is a young word for a fitness magazine. The magazine writers have to create a magazine that includes as many men’s interests as possible to get as many customers as possible whilst withstanding the ‘man’ elements.

The code of the magazine is very much what the theme of the past paragraphs was about. However, we have to look deeper into the hidden message of the front cover; what it is trying to tell us and why. The first, obvious message that the cover is telling the readers is to improve their lives; starting to or enhancing the ‘man’ aspect of your current character. It is predicting that you will want to improve your muscle, sex life and loss of weight even if you don’t want to. The cover includes the main two topics that they think most men will take an interest to: gaining muscle and sex. Then near the bottom is the less popular topics but are used just in case the customer isn’t interested in the first two. These less popular topics for this particular magazine are tips on how to ‘strip away stress’ and ‘summer looks.’ The initial intention of the magazine is to subconsciously manipulate you into a sense of need for this magazine, the cover is showing you all that you can achieve and how much your life will improve when buying this magazine.

In conclusion, I think that the magazine is attractive for the target audience it is set to. Its unusual use of plain shades with the blood red added to it really says a lot about the content of the magazine. The editors have made the left third tempting and attractive, the plugs interesting, the genre well suited and the coding well thought out.