Planning the contents of a magazine

A In pairs, make a list of the typical contents of magazines aimed at women aged between 25 and 45.

B 0.3 An editorial meeting is taking place to plan the next issue of Glorious magazine, a monthly magazine aimed at women aged between 25 and 45. Listen to extracts from the meeting and see how many of your ideas from exercise A are mentioned.

C 0.3 Listen again and answer the following questions.

1. According to the fashion editor, who are going to be big names in the future?

2. What does Scott want to commission a short piece about?

3. Why does the editor-in-chief say “I’ll hand you over to Richard”?

4. What is Grace going to do a short piece about?

5. When are the deadlines for commissioning articles, copy and artwork?

6. When are the members of the editorial team meeting to make the final decision on contents for the July issue?

D Underline the verb forms used to express the future in the questions in Exercise C. Then decide which verb form is used in the following situations.

1. To express a spontaneous decision about the future

2. To talk about a plan for the future made before the moment of speaking

3. To talk about a fixed future arrangement

4. To talk about a future schedule

5. To make a prediction about the future

E Look at the following sentences from an editorial planning meeting and decide who might say them: the depute editor, the fashion editor, the beauty editor, or all of them. There may be more than one possible answer.

1. I’ll look into the new Chanel cosmetic range.

2. I’m meeting Peter tomorrow to decide which photos we want to use.

3. We’re not going to include the story about student debt.

4. There’s no way I’m going to meet the deadline

5. What time is the Armani shoot?

F Look at the sentences in Exercise E again and decide which verb form has been used in each sentence to express the future. Explain why?

3. Focus on reading Tabloid

A tabloid is a newspaper industry term which refers to a smaller newspaper format per spread; to a weekly or semi-weekly alternative newspaper that focuses on local-interest stories and entertainment, often distributed free of charge (often in a smaller, tabloid-sized newspaper format); or to a newspaper that tends to emphasize sensational crime stories, gossip columns repeating scandalous innuendos about the personal lives of celebrities and sports stars, and other so-called "junk food news" (often in a smaller, tabloid-sized newspaper format). As the term "tabloid" has become synonymous with down-market newspapers in some areas, some papers refer to themselves as "Compact" newspapers instead.

The word "Tabloid" comes from the name given by the London based pharmaceutical company Burroughs Wellcome & Co. to the compressed tablets they marketed as "Tabloid" pills in the late 1880s. Prior to compressed tablets medicine was usually taken in bulkier powder form. While Burroughs Wellcome & Co. were not the first to derive the technology to make compressed tablets, they were the most sucessful at marketing them, hence the popularity of the term 'tabloid' in popular culture. The connotation of tabloid was soon applied to other small items and to the "compressed" journalism that condensed stories into a simplified, easily-absorbed format. The label of "tabloid journalism" (1901) preceded the smaller sheet newspapers that contained it (1918).

An early pioneer of tabloid journalism was Alfred Harmsworth (1865–1922), who amassed a large publishing empire of halfpenny papers by rescuing failing stolid papers and transforming them to reflect the popular taste, which yielded him enormous profits. Harmsworth used his tabloids to influence public opinion, for example, by bringing down the wartime government of Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith in the Shell Crisis of 1915.

This style of journalism and newspaper publishing has been exported to various other countries, including the United States. The daily tabloids in the United States—which date back to the founding of the New York Daily News in 1919—are generally much less overheated and less oriented towards scandal and sensationalism than their British counterparts. With the exception of the supermarket tabloids (see below), which have little mainstream credibility, the word "tabloid" in the U.S. can refer more to format than to content. The tabloid format is used by a number of respected and indeed prize-winning American papers.

Prominent US tabloids include nationally the Metro, locally, the Philadelphia Daily News, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Rocky Mountain News in Denver, the Boston Herald, the New York Observer, Newsday on New York's Long Island, the San Francisco Examiner and Baltimore Examiner.

In the UK, three previously broadsheet daily newspapers—The Independent, The Times, and The Scotsman—have switched to tabloid size in recent years, although they call it "compact" to avoid the down-market connotation of that word. Similarly, when referring to the down-market tabloid newspapers the alternative term "red-top" (referring to their traditionally red-coloured mastheads) is increasingly used, to distinguish them from the up-market compact newspapers.