Heat Magazine

The Heat magazine uses conventions on their front covers to attract the target market audience so that they buy the Heat magazine over any other magazine. Heat is a weekly magazine about gossip amongst celebrities. It has a circulation of half a million and has weekly issues. The Heat magazine specialises in maintaining the reputation in the public eye of celebrities who normally would have ‘fallen by the wayside’ or been replaced by other celebrities.

The celebrities highlighted in gossip magazines are usually female. This is because they can be presented as the 'female victim'. In the Heat magazine woman are often sexualised so that a male audience is attracted. Woman celebrities are also often represented in a negative light by leaking there personal life so that the issue attracts the curious target audience.

The primary audience are white, urban and female working class people who tend to be main streamers and have interests in celebrity gossip. The primary audience are generally around 18-35 year olds and the secondary audience is 35-55.

The colours used on the Heat front cover are saturated primary colours and have high key lighting. This is so that the magazine codes and conventions are anchored and the target audience is highlighted. The front cover of the Heat magazine has a high ratio of photos to text. This is a key design for a gossip magazine so that the user can identify it.

The masthead on the Heat magazine is always to the left and keeps the same design. The masthead is a lower case, red, serif font which uses a bold format with a shadow to form brand identity. The style of the font would stereotypically appeal to a female target audience.

On most issues of the Heat magazine, there is a sell line banner which advertises gossip articles inside the magazine. The sell line banner will use a photo and bold writing to attract the user to the article. In this example below you can see an article about the celebrity Katie Price. The mode of address is direct and upbeat as you can see from the font used and the exclamation mark. It seams like a boring article to the target audience but in brackets underneath it says “And gets off with a man half way through!” This tells the user what the article is really about and will interest the audience because it is gossip.

Gossip magazine covers are generally cluttered with bold text, images and colours to keep the attention and interest of the reader.  By making the stories and articles look exciting, the reader will think the gossip is important. This can make the reader feel like this is exclusive information and make them feel inclusive because they think know something not many others know about.