Magazine Analysis

1.) My Magazine is Sport Illustrated, the issue published on Feb. 9th 2009 after the 43rd super bowl. The article I randomly selected my 100 words from was the main article about the Super Bowl. It had 5 sentences and 148 syllables, which calculates to the readability level of a 14 year old.

2.) The whole magazine had 70 total pages with 16 of them containing ads. The content to ads ratio comes out to 27:8. This content ratio is considerably high for a sports magazine, but it still has many ads. It shows that this magazine has multiple page articles that cut down on the space for ads. This particular issue may have been higher in content than others because its main article was the Super Bowl, which is kinda important in the sports world I'd say, meaning the article would be more detailed and longer.

3.) The other magazine at my table was a fishing magazine, with a readability of a 12 year old. It's content to ad ratio was 5:3 but with more ads than content. This comparison shows that most magazines that would be aimed at an older male audience, fishing and sports, are very low on the readability level. It shows that, when reading a magazine about a basic interest or hobby, males don't want to read anything that will challenge their brain. It shows that Sports Illustrated is a little more challenging because it has more content than a fishing magazine.

4.) The profile of a common Sports Illustrated reader would be a male, ranging from the age of a early teenager to a grown man, with grown men being the most common reader because they're the ones subscribing to it. The immediate interests of the consumer would be sports and subjects such as athlete interviews, game coverage, and behind the scene sports stories. The socioeconomic status would be pretty much anything, but most commonly middle class teenagers and their fathers. The values of the reader wouldn't be too deep, but they'd be reading this magazine for entertainment and inside knowledge. The reading level of most readers would be generally higher than the 14 year old that the Fry Graph suggests, but the older readers aren't going to turn away the magazine because it's content is so basic. The journalistic style is not so much journalism as it is a report on a game so the readability should not be too difficult.