City Magazines Under The Interactivity Between The Middle Class And Consumerism Society

Propelled by the united force of industrialization and urbanization, city magazine under the category of consumer's magazine complies with both the trend of regionalization in media industry and the wave of citywide consumerism revolution. It has reached its maturity in America where boasts of a thriving magazine industry., and mainly targets the "middle class" with high incomes and good education.The "middle class" tend to consume the symbol value of goods due to their comparatively high economic and cultural capitals. While the service information provided by city magazines effectively satisfy the need of the "middle class" to go after a sense of group belonging and class identification.With the quickening pace of China's industrialization and urbanization, there were scholars showing confidence in city magazine's future development from time to time since the first batch of Chinese city magazines appeared in the middle of 1990s'.However, those newly-born city magazines met many problems and confusions in their cradle years.New York magazine, seen as the pioneer among America's city magazines, drew a lot of imitators after its inception in 1968. This paper mainly discusses how New York has successfully become the vehicle for the interaction between its middle-class readers and the consumerism society, together with a concise introduction to the success of New York magazine and a content analysis of its whole cover stories in 2007, in the hope of offering some references for Chinese city magazines to their healthier and smoother development in the future.