Research On City Zine

Since 1990s, there has emerged a magazine form that can meet the cultural demands of new class culture-magazine of urban life due to the increasingly open national ideology and culture, the acceleration of urbanization and the growing size of emerging middle classes. As one of magazine representatives, City Zine takes the life form and lifestyle of modern urban youth as major content and the leader of new life as slogan to conduct a prospective observation on urban life and fashion trend with the purpose of building and conveying the elegant, exquisite, warm and refreshing life concept for the readers.City Zine, as a magazine of urban life, shows striking characteristics in terms of editing:it pays attention to three themes including city, literature and art, and life, and highlights the prosy language style, self-experience and feelings. Apart from these, it lays stress on detailed and instant control in respect of picture selection, while on the freshness in the case of color use.City Zine also has diverse cultural styles, of which urban culture, indie pop subculture and consumerism culture are most remarkable. It turns out that City Zine has a close relationship with these three kinds of culture. Firstly, City Zine enjoys a symbiotic relationship with urban culture, able to create a win-win situation. The analysis on urban cultural communication of City Zine according to Lasswell’s 5W communication model has summed up the urban culture disseminated by the magazine, finding that urban culture is mainly constituted by urban material culture, urban behavioral culture and urban concept culture. City Zine is deficient in some aspects while devoted to disseminating culture:on the one hand, City Zine pays insufficient attention to the development of urban cultural resources and content innovation, and one the other, it neglects audience’s feedbacks, thus achieving unsatisfactory communication effect. Secondly, City Zine, equipped with a remarkably indie pop subculture style, and explores the characteristics and construction of indie pop subculture style based on the sub-cultural theory of Birmingham School. City Zine has established the indie pop subculture style from six angles including text, photography, clothing, music, film and traveler in a positive manner. In new environment, this style shows a new meaning:from individual perspective, the indie pop subculture style can contribute to a sense of identity and the enjoyment of reading; from cultural perspective, this style not only represents a kind of ritual resistance, but also takes a lead in fashion culture; from economic perspective, this indie pop subculture is unable to break away from the shackle of consumerism. Finally, the consumerism culture of City Zine is expressed by way of explicit consumer information and implicit consumer concept. The embodiment of the most remarkable feature is that the consumption is induced indirectly by the publicity of lifestyle and the slogan of "guiding a new life" faces the loss of value.Undeniably, the editing characteristics and unique cultural connotations of City Zine have distinguished it from other magazines of the same category. However, due to the recreational contents and the homogenized topic, the slogan of "guiding a new life" faces the loss of value and the challenges of new media, because of which the development is stunted. To carve out a way for the sake of healthy and long-term development, it is necessary to put forward effective strategies, including not only strengthening content construction, highlighting the particularity of topic, and establishing and conveying correct life concept, but also improving the interaction with new media, and realizing triple marketing and sales positively.