Peer Pitch and Concept Refinement

 

CATEGORY	DETAILS
Film OR Magazine	Magazine
Genre	Special interest; history, science, current events
Target Audience (Be specific)	University educated people with an interest in history but without a formal advanced education in history, along with people with an interest in current events, science, and associated topics
What is your concept? (Be thorough & specific. Review the links on Blackboard)	Explain current events with history. This will either be by explaining how a certain situation came to be with a cross-disciplinary history-based explanation or relating a current situation with a comparable historical situation.
How did you conceive the idea for this concept?	I have always liked history as well as many other subjects. History is not always viewed through the lens of other subjects so I thought of creating a magazine that attempted that.
What do you believe is unique about your concept?	I want to focus on more obscure or less-widely known historical periods to Anglophones when possible. This will give the historical element of the magazine a fresh perspective as it will be about eras many are not familiar with. I want to combine several subjects in an authentic and effective manner. This cross-disciplinary aspect would expand the potential reader base as it would appeal to more people.
Why do you believe this product will be of interest to your audience?	When someone reads a magazine, it will often focus on a single, specific topic. The hybrid nature of our magazine can expand out of the main focus of history, into other topics, and providing a correlation from those topics back into history that makes our magazine’s subject unique.
FEEDBACK RECEIVED FROM PEERS	Relate it to modern day implications. How does history repeat itself? Oddities and random stories not learned in school. Historical idiot of the month. Mention something insane.

Last Friday Sam and I pitched our magazine idea to the class. The class feedback was very interesting and quite helpful in how we will proceed with our magazine. The class really liked the concept and expressed different ideas that we could incorporate into our idea. This showed us that we had a much larger potential audience than we initially expected, and this will allow us to be more flexible with our magazine. Mensah Demary, executive editor of Catapult, Counterpoint Press, and Soft Skull Press and a founding editor of Catapult magazine, says that the role of the editor is to be the connective tissue between the publisher and the readers. Presenting our concept was the connective tissue for us. The class liked the more serious aspects of the concept, but also expressed an interest in less serious topics within the same concept. This will definitely make it easier to complete an issue. The larger audience and the expressed interest in numerous different types of content opens up a lot more material for us to cover, as well as different ways to cover that material.

It is important to create content that is both unique, but also something that people want. According to Statistica, the aggregate revenue of US based magazines in 2017 was 60% lower than in 2007. Due to the rise in free online content, we will have to create content that people really want. Also according to Statistica, the fastest growing US magazine is Architectural Digest, and according to Ovidbel magazines such as Popular Science and Harvard Business Review have seen an increase in subscriptions. These magazines all share common traits: they produce high quality content that is well researched. This is what people want. There is plenty of low quality content to be found on the internet for free, but when people want high quality they have no problem turning to more traditional formats. We want to use these existing trends to create quality content that explores under-analyzed and appreciated topics. As Camille Dungy, an editor and author, says “Much of what I want to do as an editor is to stretch our ability to see beauty and potential in new places and ways.”