Publication Profile

Format: As long as it takes, double-spaced, 1” margins; put your name, my name, the class, assignment number, and date in the upper left corner of the first page; number pages in the upper right corner; have a title.

Instructions: For A3, you’ll write an article as you would if you intended to publish it in a particular publication. That means you’ll have to get to know the editorial ethos, and the audience the publication has defined. The goal of this assignment is to help you understand your rhetorical situation in this project.

1. Choose a publication from this list: Choose from this list: Boston Review, The Atlantic Monthly, Rolling Stone, Seed (seedmagazine.com), Orion (orionmagazine.org), The Rumpus (therumpus.net), Salon (Salon.com), Vox (vox.com), The New Inquiry, The Root (theroot.com), Colorlines (colorlines.com), Harper’s Magazine, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Guernica Magazine (guernicamag.com), ProPublica (propublica.org), Aeon (aeon.co), Harlot (harlotofthearts.org), The Mask (maskmagazine.com) National Public Radio (npr.org). I’ll consider others, but first you’ll have to convince me.
2. Write a profile of it, including details like its owners, editors, publishers, history, etc. and why those things might matter, but more importantly, look at the rhetoric it uses to frame its content. What is the overall ethos of the magazine? Who is the intended audience? What ethos does it encourage readers to adopt? What are its politics? How can you tell? Which topics does it tend to emphasize? How? Which ones does it minimize or outright ignore? What images accompany these stories? How does graphic design work as rhetoric? If there are advertisements, how might they be relevant to your understanding of this publication and its relationship to its audience? Is this a print only publication? Is it totally free online? Is some or all content paywalled for subscribers?  Does it feature staff writers or regular columnists and contributors? If so, who are they and why is it significant that they have a regular platform here?
3. Explain why this publication would be a good fit for your A3 essay, and how the key details from your profile will matter to the rhetorical decisions you’ll make as a writer in A3.