The MA Publishing (Magazine) pathway benefits from the great range and depth of experience our teaching staff have to offer and our industry partners. Whatever role our graduates choose in the magazine publishing industry, they benefit from well-grounded and future-looking knowledge and teaching.

Course Structure

In Phase 1, your learning is focused on professional competencies, practices and theories in magazine publishing. You will learn about:

• How magazine publishers choose what they publish
  
• The working relationship between editors and writers and photographers
  
• The collaboration between editorial, marketing and production
  
• How magazines are promoted, marketed and sold
  
• Interpreting markets and building routes and business models to the market
  
• How magazines and content is designed and produced for print, online and mobile devices
  
• The technologies that underpin modern magazine production
  
• The impact of digital technology on production and publishing
  
• Publishing and media law and contracts
  
• Distribution channels for magazines

In Phase 2, you will widen and deepen your understanding of how publishing functions. You will learn about:

The publishing business

• The business operations of magazine publishers
  
• Publishing finances and management
  
• Project managing publishing projects
• Doing research for publishing

In Phase 2 you will also be able to study two Electives.

 

In Phase 3, if you are progressing through to a Masters Degree, you will be concentrating on doing research and writing up your dissertation. Your dissertation will focus on an issue or challenge in publishing that you have identified through an extensive literature research. 

The entire teaching and learning programme is supported by a programme of visiting speakers, whose lectures will illuminate further what you have been absorbing in the classroom and through groupwork.

Assignments

In Phases 1 and 2, students will work on assignments which take the form of reports and group work. For group-work each group tackles a challenging publishing problem and demonstrate analysis and solutions through presentations and reports. One of your reports in Phase 2 will be the research proposal for either a future publishing work-study issue, if exiting at PG Diploma, or for apublishing issue or area you wish to study as the subject of your master's dissertation.

The major assignment in Phase 2 allows the student groups to produce a publishing artefact, such a book or a magazine, or to run the annual publishing conference.

Your MA dissertation in phase 3 requires a written report of 12,000 to 15,000 words.

All assignments mirror the real-life demands of publishing.

International Summer School

Early in Phase 3, during May, we take our MA students on a week’s visit to another country to sample and learn about how publishing works there. We arrange visits to publishing houses and book shops, and to professional organisations connected with publishing. We have visited Moscow and St Petersburg, Athens, Paris, and Stuttgart, and most recently (2008), we went to Krakow and Warsaw in Poland.

This week is a real learning and cultural experience, and a thoroughly enjoyable one.

 

Visiting Industry Speakers

Lectures from visiting professionals are one of the highlights of the course. Our speakers are carefully chosen for their ability to make the subject of their lectures lively and interesting for the students. 
The visiting lecturer programme is crafted to include not just the range of publishing that exists in today’s world, but also the full range of functions. The programme gives the students a chance to observ e and reflect on what kind of publishing they want to enter, and what kind of job.

Our visiting lecturers often pop up  in other parts of the course as speakers on the Conference panels, and as advisers on the students’ research projects. Many are also from companies represented on our Industry Forum.

Our visiting lecturers for the 2007-08 academic year have included:

• Matthew Kershaw (BBH Advertising)
  
• Emily Moore (Managing Editor, Tank)
  
• Bryn Walls (Art Director, Dorling Kindersley)
  
• Nicholas Spice (London Review of Books magazine)
  
• Kenny Hemphill (Deputy Editor, MacUser Magazine)
  
• Mike Daines (Designer and Publisher)
  
• Andy Cowles (Editorial Development Director, IPC Media)
  
• Anne Westwood (Media Consultant)
  
• Kevin Braddock (Contributing Editor, British GQ)
  
• Lisa Smosarski (Editor, More)
  
• Nina Caplan (Features Editor, Time Out)
  
• Jennifer Jeffrey (Production Director, Redwood)

Other magazine industry speakers included Dylan Jones, Editor of British GQ Magazine, who was a panelist on the Publishing Innovation Conference.