The Effect Of Chinese Mainstream Magazines On The Frame Construction Of Celebrity Culture

Celebrity is an important part of modern Chinese culture, and it profoundly influences all other mass culture. The frame construction of celebrity culture is presented to be a sustainable process, in which frames exist both in the context of the production and on the side of the receiver, specifically, this process is characterized by the two-way mode that individuals and organizations give their subjective comprehension to information, which is then disseminated to others, while the receivers selectively comprehend it and keep it as a part of personal social knowledge. Providing the public not only with information on the celebrity himself but also on how it should be interpreted, mass media plays a pivotal role as celebrity culture producers, along with celebrities themselves and other social powers. Media reconstruct frame packages by choosing, interpreting, and even emphasizing information, in this way they usually transform the status of news characters, and make a great impact on construction of celebrity culture. In China, mainstream magazines contribute most to this process, due to increasingly rich coverage on celebrities, and by positioning themselves as readings of elite class and the highly-educated.This research chooses the celebrity reporting in Chinese mainstream magazines and their audiences as research subjects. It will analyze those that contain rich celebrity reporting and have large audience markets, including comprehensive people magazines (comprehensive magazines concentrating on figure reporting) such as Southern People Weekly (nanfang renwu zhoukan), Global People (huanqiu renwu); comprehensive news magazines such as Life Week (sanlian shenghuo zhoukan), Southern Metropolis Weekly (nandu zhoukan), Vista Story (Vista kantianxia); business magazines such as China Entrepreneur (zhongguo qiyejia), Finance (caijing); fashion magazines such Esquire (shishang xiansheng), QG Chinese version, aiming at analyzing how Chinese main magazines construct the framework of celebrity reporting. While analyzing choices of celebrity subjects, report planning, reporting methodologies, and reporting angles, communication research methodologies such as content analysis and in-depth interviews will be used, while analyzing to what extent the public is affected by celebrity reporting, qualitative and quantitative approaches such as questionnaire and case studies will be used and some comparison will be made among different types of audiences as well.