Magazine research

• Sports Illustrated is a sports magazine and falls under the sport category and is comes out in weekly issues and roughly 3,000,000 copies weekly. The publisher is Frank Wall and the first issue was on the 16th of August 1954 and the magazine is still up, running and releasing their weekly issues and its based in New York, USA.
• Sports Illustrated's purpose is simple, to sell magazines. Selling magazines doesn't necessarily mean its all about making money, selling magazines can also be used to update info on not only its customers, but it's sponsors etc. 
• I think the target audience are sports fans or anyone interested or has anything to do with sports, from fans to the pro athletes and coaches themselves. Its effective because sports illustrated doesn't just cover one sport, it covers all major sports and and little rising issues in the world of sport, e.g cover basketball, baseball, football, tennis, netball and many more sports (Unfortunately I could not retrieve an image on the internet of a sports illustrated contents page)
• The focus of the cover above is Michael Jordan and his entry into the Hall of Fame and the end of his career. You can tell this from the title "Jordan celebrating a hall of fame career" The word "Jordan" is type up in capitals and is the biggest word on the page because its emphasising on how much of a big star he was during his career. The image is a bird's eye view camera shot of Michael about to dunk a basketball. I think they chose this image because Michael was well known from a famous dunk he performed in a slam dunk contest and he jumped from 13 feet away from the basket and successfully dunked the basketball and that's why I think they chose that image, Michael was also a high-flyer and this means means he jumped high and was a good dunker.
• I think the magazine is effective in putting its message across, the cover story gives a brief profile of what to expect in the full story. This simple design shows a lot and it was about the overview of Michael Jordan's career and I think the bird's eye camera shot emphasised on that. What I've learnt from this cover is how to emphasise what your cover story is about in different ways e.g. camera shots, placing of of image, text size etc.