Vulture is an online blog component of New York Magazine which describes itself as "the entertainment destination... a beacon for passionate fans who want a smart, comprehensive take on the world of culture and offers around-the-clock, wall-to-wall coverage of movies, tv, music and beyond. Vulture's writers and editors celebrate culture both high and low, because you never know where the next truly brilliant moment will come from."
New York magazine was founded in April 1968 and is a weekly magazine concerned with the life, culture, politics and style of New York City. Today, the magazine reaches 1.8 million readers each week, while the website (which allows those outside of NYC to access content), recognised as one of the industry's most innovative and success, receives seven million users monthly.
The blog is described as having the mindset of "a critic and the heart of the fan," bringing smart and funny analysis to all things popular culture. The writers are intelligent, well-informed and articulate and convey their ideas in such a way that posts are both easy to read and interesting enough to want to keep on reading.
The layout is minimal (as we all seem to aesthetically agree on), easy to navigate, with a categories bar at the top next to the header (movies, TV, music, books, art, theatre) and again at the bottom of the page (below the fold) with the top three stories from each category. A slideshow style banner features important articles to read while 'The Feed' to the right of it shows the latest posts (time stamped).
Unfortunately the media kit for Vulture doesn't include demographic information (fail whale), so I'm relying on the demographics for nymag.com to shed some insight into the reader of Vulture. The readership is split 40%/ 60% (men to women) while the median age is 30 years. The majority (59%) of users are 18 - 34 and 76% of their readers have a college degree. Basically for us this means that our target users will be university educated ranging from the ages of 18 - 30 (?), have an interest in popular culture and entertainment and be internet and tech savvy. This last quality is particular important given our topic is memes and so must appreciate and/ or engage in meme making.
Vulture and the other New York magazine blogs are also popular for their blog commenters (as we noted in their Pop Culture Mysteries article about Under the Bridge with 42 comments and counting). This would be ideal (not only for the potential 'troll' factor) but to focus our web feature on stimulating thought and discussion around our topics, allowing others to contribute to ideas and even question what we put forward.
I believe Vulture would be a great publication for us to utilise for our web feature because a) They have a clean, sleek layout which we can all appreciate b) Have the target readership and demographics that match our topic c) Have a writing style that would work well with our meme investigation and is easy to follow d) Have a reader base that enjoys commenting and contributing to features.
Although there is no 'internet' category at this point, Vulture does publish a weekly wrap up of the best viral videos which definitely poses potential to include a meme or internet phenomena type section which would be the basis of our web feature. As we're looking to analyse and break down certain memes and capture their success, track their history and significance to popular culture, I think Vulture would be a suitable publication for us allowing us to put a more serious, academic, in-depth perspective on a rather 'trivial' or 'shallow' topic (as some outsiders might say although from our research so far there is more than meets the eye) which is in line with Vulture's mission statement of the celebrating and blurring of high and low culture.
Would love to hear your thoughts!
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