Magazine Cover Review

 Not once in my life had I ever willfully read a magazine that had nothing to do with school or a project for the last mentioned; the most I had done with one on my own has been to run through the pages and look at the pictures and advertisements, but finally now thanks to the class I have taken a deeper look at these pieces of literature and came to understand the logic and "science" behind them. 

 Despite being described as full of "disease and mull a cure" in the article "Chances are you won't bother to read this article. It is just one long block of text, after all, unbroken by alluring pictures, snappy captions, or eye-grabbing infographics. You can't click it. You can't flip it. All you can do is read it. (Does size matter?)", I believe that it does exactly what is intended to do; sell. Unlike a book or newspaper article, a magazine's sole purpose is to lure in a customer to sell its advertisements through the use of bombastic words and tempting pictures. We can take a clear look at this through the GQ magazine, where the rapper Travis Scott is the biggest selling point, portrayed in bright red lights, and with its various commercials linked to him and his style throughout the magazine. Another example in the spectrum of women is in Vogue, where the luxurious lifestyle pictures, perfect models, and beaming jewelry attract the more wealthy customers.

 The article mentions that most magazines now resemble movie posters more closely than they do the dry pages of a book, and all of the ones reviewed in class support the claim. In Men's Health and Cosmopolitan, despite being targeted toward opposite sexes, the covers both display one person that stands tall and powerful, as if the main character of a movie. This has become a trend as it is a huge selling point. Rolling Stones more than any other of the magazines reviewed give the sensation of the pictures being taken from a movie; the rapper Lil Baby is standing over Black Lives Matter amid the Minneapolis riots over the death of George Floyd. The magazine combines the selling points and its own political point of view, bringing bias into it and targeting a specific group of people. 

 In all of these magazines the exaggerated titles on the first page and features that are kept from the reader until the very end, allow him or her to flip through pages on pages and see as many of their advertisements as possible. This thought me that the word choice and pictures displayed in magazines are the main attractions.