Page 107 - Introduction to Electronic Commerce and Social Commerce

96 • Sport, Media and Society

The sport media is as diverse as its audience. This chapter explores some of the tech-
niques that the sport media uses to engage the different segments of its audiences, focus-
ing on sport and fitness magazines. Sport-related magazines use both direct and indirect

modes of address to interpellate their prospective readers. The chapter provides a close
analysis of magazine covers, editorials and contents to show how the text, image, layout,
typeface and cover lines all combine to hail readers to buy the magazine. As readers
make the decision to purchase their sport magazine, they actively step into the address of
that magazine. In this way, the identities of readers are shown to be constructed in inter-
action with the sport media. The two case studies for this chapter demonstrate the ways
that social identities are implicit within the subject positions presented to the reader by
two specialist sport magazines, Climber and Crush.

The Characteristics of Magazines

Magazines represent a large and diverse section of the media industry. Around 9,000
different titles exist in the United Kingdom and 19,000 in the United States (Holmes

2007). Sport-, exercise- and fitness-orientated magazines form an important sector of
the market. Sports Illustrated, for example, has circulation figures of over 3,000,000

(Audit Bureau of Circulations 2007). Yet, despite their popularity, magazines are
considered lowbrow media forms (McLoughlin 2000). In part, this reputation is a
result of the way magazines are structured. The magazine is designed for readers to
browse, dipping into and out of stories, flicking through the pages and admiring the

images. Magazines vary greatly and incorporate a range of formats from slickly fash-
ioned glossy publications to home-produced, stapled pages. Typically, magazines
are issued in regular intervals and include a number of articles on a range of topics
(Holmes 2007). Historically, there have been connections made between this format
and the popularity of magazines, with women needing short breaks from domestic
chores. However, as gendered working patterns have changed, so has the range of
magazines targeted at men, for example, Beynon (2002: 125) called Men’s Health
‘one of the publishing successes of recent years’.
Abrahamson (2007) argued that magazines are different from other forms of
media in their ‘exceptional’ capacity to shape social life. Magazines typically focus
on some aspect of contemporary culture and help to define its characteristics, norms

and values. One unusual feature of magazines is the way that they can allow for a
unique connection between media producers and consumers. This is particularly the
case with specialist magazines, such as Climber, where the editors, writers and read-
ers may identify themselves as part of the same community with a shared interest
in a particular activity. The term journalistic distance refers to the ideological and
material differences between those who create and consume media products. Unlike
other media formats, there may be little journalistic distance between the produc-
ers and the consumers of a magazine in terms of their approach to the activity and