Sunday, 12 June 2011

The Genre Change in Children’s Magazine

The topic that I am discussing is “Children’s Magazines Cater to True Early Adopters with Mobile Apps.” I will be looking at the angle of genre change in children’s magazine to digital publication with the advantages. In summary, magazines have go beyond the traditional media to digital magazines that are designed for kids is giving a new meaning to the phrase “early adopter” by Sivek (2011). Nowadays, even magazines are available in application for the kids due to most of them do own an iPad these days. There are several applications that are developed for the kids, such as Timbuktu which is an iPad news magazine; Ladybug’s Bookself offers stories with animation and sound, and Kid’sMag which includes a collection of informative and educational games mentioned by Sivek (2011). Below is a link to the whole article for a further understanding.

Figure 1 - Timbuktu Magazines on iPad for the children.

Figure 2 - The opening screen for one of the stories in the Ladybug's Bookshelf on iPhone application.

Figure 3 - The Cover page of KidsMag’s fist issue.

Figure 4 - One of the stories in KidsMag’s first issue.

To my opinion with the new age of publishing, this may help the children in their growing and learning process, even researches has proved this. Besides that, with the new age of publishing this may also improve the children’s interpretation skills between prose and graphics, but more to the interpretation of graphics. As in the traditional media the printing of graphics are more expensive than the text, thus with the digital publication the cost are much more cheaper as digital publishing count on the space that are taken. 

According to Bernhardt (1986), physical fact of the text with its spatial appearance on the page requires visual concern which means a text can be seen, must be seen in a process which is essentially different from the perception of speech. He also identify this as the visually-informative text and non-visually informative text, whereas visual-informative text may be identified through headings and identifying symbols. In addition, written text is necessary, but visual informative text helps to smoothen the process of understanding the content. So it is important to the children by having these digital publications for them with prose and more graphics which would help them to understand better.

Whereas Walsh (2006) focuses on the text and the reading process, he believes that reading involved three different levels of interpreting, responding and understanding at affective cognitive levels, and lastly analyzing. He also stressed on the medium ability, by reading the text it may lead the people’s mind to imagine what is the message are trying to transmit. Therefore, the new age of publishing with digital publication do help the children to enhance their interpretation skills between prose and graphics. 

As a result, the changing from traditional media to digital publishing may improved the children’s understanding by providing more graphics in digital publishing. Yet, it seems that even children nowadays are more to the new media. Besides that, children are our future generation so the application developers are aiming to cater the children with more applications. Thus, this may enhance our new generation’s digital media skills in the future so it is understandable that there are so many applications catering for the children nowadays.

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