Regional magazines deal with many of the same issues as major publications. However, the unique challenges faced by these publications are interesting to explore.
Regional magazines serve a niche market that larger, nationwide of international, magazines can't always reach. They cater to a smaller audience who all share a common residential location. Even if these people are otherwise very diverse, a common location is a strong unifier. Parents have children in the same school systems, working adults work in the same areas, people attend many of the same cultural events and consumers make their purchases from the same retailers. Regardless of national trends, culture is largely produced on a local scale.
Regional publications speak directly to local culture, economics, politics, or lifestyles in a way that national brands simply can't match. It is much more difficult for a national magazine to speak to the very specific concerns of a region on the same level as a regional publication. In addition to market research, the experiences of the people that work for and with the magazine come into play. Residents of the area they serve, these professionals are more in touch with the region and what drives their readers to buy their magazine.
Hudson Valley Magazine, for example, is targeted to consumers who live within the ten counties that make up the Hudson Valley between Westchester and Rensselaer County. The concerns and interests of this particular set of consumers are bound to differ from those in another geographic area. In order to reach consumers, Hudson Valley Magazine is available by subscription as well as on the newsstand. Awareness of the magazine is maintained by stocking copies in doctors' offices, hotels, and local businesses
As a large portion of the population of the lower Hudson Valley commutes to New York City for work, where publications like Time Out maintain popularity with their listings of events, it comes as no surprise that this magazine seeks to emulate that to some small degree. Time Out does not feature listings for events outside of the metropolitan area of New York City, but the information for this area is featured in Hudson Valley Magazine. In the face of readily available internet, newspaper, and even televisions listings, these listings must be produced in such a way so as to make them preferable to these other sources of information. Listings for the entire month, an improvement upon the daily and weekly newspaper listings, are provided.
They are divided by region and accompanied by the website addresses, where available, so that readers can get more information. Websites for local events and establishments are not always easily searchable via Google or other search engines because of their comparatively low level of traffic. However, by appearing as a key component in the layout of a regional magazine and its listings, readers can more easily find these sites. Local events are listed near the center of the magazine with lively descriptions that, rather than marginalizing them, lend the events the same credibility as events in the city.
A local ballet as reviewed and promoted just as an even at Lincoln Center might be, including full color photography. Photographs are large and accompanied at times by reviews, articles, or further information which blend the line between the listings and the feature stories of the magazine. This serves to make the flow of the magazine less choppy as it is not starkly divided into sections but rather the different departments flow into each other. This method prevents thinner sections from appearing paltry; a single page section flows into larger sections that border it, forming a cohesive whole. The aforementioned photographs, while providing imagery, also serve to pad the space where editorial content is lacking.
However, the level of photography, while it is often very beautiful, does not always measure up to that of larger publications. This is due to a multitude of circumstances but one key contributing factor is that Hudson Valley Magazine does not subject all of its photography to the same level of proofing, correction, and other scrutiny that many national publications do. All of this work is done in-house by the magazine staff, as opposed to being sent out to a prepress facility.
Prepress facilities submit photographs to extensive, and often repeated, rounds of proofing and color correction, often spending a great deal of time on a single image. Since a page may contain several images, this time adds up quite quickly. However, Hudson Valley Magazine only spends an average of five to seven minutes on each page of the magazine, leading to a somewhat degraded level of photography. Proofs are made of entire pages rather than single images and “SWOP quality proofs” are only created for some pages of the publication, like a feature story, while other pages are proofed using a full color laser printer (Oesterle). These laser printer proofs are generally to proof the content, however, more than the image quality.
