Representation And Construction Of Middle Class Culture In News Journals

Along with our country political power getting stronger, economic strength rising and the media environment getting easier, news weeklies started to awaken and have come into being over the years. This kind of publications are marked with guide thinking and in-depth explanation. Among them, Life Weekly, which is packed in the cloak of cultural critique news, gives objective reports with humanities, enriches the categories of news weekly, and therefore performs outstandingly in the heated market competition. Its success is inseparable from its clear positioning, which aims at the middle class and embeds their unique perspective into all the elements of the journal, including the settings, the content of the selected topic planning, the structure layout, and its narrative style. Life Weekly is engaged in diluting current politics of traditional news journal, delivering high-quality reports of cultural life, constructing and representing the culture of its main target class, and strengthening the readers’ identity.Due to the formation time and the background of the middle class, neither the Academia nor the Industry is able to define the middle class and the class identity is difficult. Through the relevant reports and the commercial advertisements, Life Weekly builds the image of the middle class and provides a way to identify the class. In the light of Representation Theory, and through content analysis and case study, the present dissertation will take samples from Life Weekly issued in the last three years(2012-2014), and analyze its culture construction behind the report based on the positioning of this journal, in an attempt to explain how this journal chooses the report according to the audience, how to represent the culture of the middle class by making sense competition venues, what type of culture to represent, and what the breakthrough is during the process of representation. This dissertation tries to explore the sense production and mode shape of Life Weekly to pass revelations to other journals.