Section Six: Article Update

I have now written all of the articles! I started writing them shortly after I finished all at my interviews and have just been working away at them at a steady pace. The contents list has changed a bit since my original plan but I'm happy with the finished articles and think it will be a great magazine!

This is the final list of articles:

• What’s in my bag: uni edition
• The Blog Space
• How to Balance Blogging & Uni
• The Fresher’s Beauty Survival Kit
• Fox & Feather Autumn Lookbook
• The Art of Vintage Shopping
• How I Became a Full Time Blogger
• Do’s & Don’ts of Hosting a Meet Up
• #thegirlgang
• The Art child
• Flat Lay Photography Masterclass
• Gluten-Free Pesto Pasta Salad 
• 7 Healthy Snack Ideas
• Blogette Book Club
• Feature review: Cry Baby
• Blog doctor

This is also the order that I want the articles to be in. I have decided not to separate them into categories as there are not lots of articles in one category (for instance, there is only one beauty article) and some of the articles are applicable to more than one category (.i.e. The Blog Space could be classed as blogging, lifestyle and interiors/home).

Instead I have ordered them so that articles that are related to each other or are of a similar nature appear next to each other. I have also put the university based articles at the beginning of the magazine, as this is the main theme this month.

I want to separate the articles on the contents page into 'Classics', 'Features' and 'Extras'. I have decided I want the articles to appear in numerical order therefore 'Classics' will be What's in My Bag: Uni Edition and The Blog Space (which are recurring series), 'Features' will be from How to Balance Blogging & Uni to The Art Child and 'Extras' will cover the rest.

The extras are things that might be featured every month but also might vary. For instance, Meg, who I recruited as the "health editor" wants to possibly do some workout articles in future issues however in this one she has only done food related articles.

I have also wrote up a review for the album Cry Baby by Melanie Martinez. I felt the magazine was lacking reviews of any kind, and reviews are standard content that bloggers expect to see. The beauty survival kit already "reviews" beauty products so I didn't want to add a beauty review and the fashion section was already quite lengthy.

I decided to review this album as it's a very creative and unusual album. Melanie has almost created her own genre of music with the album, and at just 21 years old she is a great role model for my target audience and is very popular with that audience. I also though it'd be interesting to express some of the creative themes through illustrations on the pages and there is a lot of room to make this spread creative.

In regards to the What's in My Bag post, I had quite a bit of trouble putting this together. My vision for the post was to have a "collage" of different bloggers' uni bags with a short comment underneath, a small photograph of the blogger and links to their blog and social media pages. However, after contacting around 20 student bloggers I only got responses from 3 and only 2 sent me their photos in time. Also the two photos as you can see below do not match up. I appreciate the effort Megan went to in the first image however it was taken on her phone and the image quality is considerably lower than in Pippa's photo. I made the decision to just feature Pippa's photo and make the article just about her. She has submitted a larger paragraph describing what's in her bag and why she thinks the contents helps her in her university life.

Megan's Photo

Pippa's photo

Another article I had issues with was the book club. Again, I had contacted a wide range of bloggers and had put a lot of appeals on social media. I wanted to pick a book that people had already read as that would mean they would only have to send over a quick review, making them more likely to take part. On the social media appeals I asked for people who had read either  #GirlBoss (which was very popular in the blogging community not long ago, so I assumed a lot of people would have) or Why Not Me? by Mindy Kaling as both are "girl power" books.

I had a lot of applicants and from the responses, decided to go with the Mindy Kaling book. I asked everyone back at the start of December if they could get their reviews (one short paragraph and a rating out of 5) over to me by the start of January. Even after prompting, I only received two reviews out of the six I had planned.

To rectify the issue I searched for blogs that had already reviewed the book, contacted the authors and asked for a snippet/summary of the review to use. This proved to be much more successful and I now have five excellent reviews and an image to include in the post! I was going to take my own photo for this post but the photograph below (from surface87.com) was too good not to include and the owner (Aurelie) thankfully gave me permission to use it.

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So those are articles! Hopefully future issues will contain a lot more content but for a first issue I think this is an appropriate amount. Also some of the articles such as the lookbook will span across multiple pages which I have taken into account. I know from previous projects that the final number of pages must be a multiple of four so I have taken that into consideration too and will probably have somewhere between 72 and 84 pages (including the front and back cover).