Magazine Industry Research: NME

I have researched the background of NME magazine to better understand its agenda and target audience. NME (New Musical Express) is a multi-media platform that publishes a weekly magazine, has a radio station, its own TV channel and am interactive website. It actively champions new music, mixing the agenda of advertisement and entertainment. NME magazine was the first magazine to include a singles chart in its 14 November edition in 1952. The magazine specialises in Gonzo journalism- a style of journalism concerned with heavy author influence, allowing articles to have 'subjective flair' and include the journalist as part of the story. This allow their stories to be more interesting, naturally, exaggeration, profanity and figurative language are a common feature of NME magazine articles. This gives NME magazine a distinct target audience. Although there is no clear cut target audience listed on the NME website (or the publisher's website), from their style of addressing the reader, I can guess that the target audience is 16-25 year olds, whose main interest in reading the magazine is because of their keen interest in music. this can also be gathered from the types of advertisements in the magazine; predominantly music related. NME magazine costs £2.20 so would be aimed at socio-economical groups between B-C2 on the JICNARS scale. The JICNARS (Joint Industrial Committee for National Readerships Surveys) scale is a way of categorising readers based on their household income in order to determine what they would be interested in reading and therefore, how to price a magazine.

B – middle management
C1 – lower management and administrative workers
C2 – skilled manual workers

According to the promotional pack on the website of its distributer (IPC Media) NME is "a truly unique multi-platform media proposition". IPC media produce NME along with over "60 iconic media brands, with print alone reaching almost two thirds of UK women and 42% of UK men – almost 26 million UK adults – while our websites collectively reach over 20 million users every month."

I obtained this information from the NRS website (National Readership Survey)

Clearly NME has a wide circulation that reaches a lot of people, this suggests that it has versatile appeal.