Ser revista e viver bem: um estudo de jornalismo a partir de Vida Simples

Abstract

This research investigates magazines as a communication medium and as a journalistic product. Despite being present in a series of studies, magazines are still not thought of as a central object of reflection within the fields of Journalism and of Communication Studies. In this sense, the main objective of this study concerns two interconnected questions. The first deals with a comprehension of the magazine by itself, seeking to understand how the product engenders and incorporates particular communicative and journalistic processes. The second question, empirically focusing on this point, discusses this particular process according to one publication, the magazine Vida Simples published by Editora Abril. Considering the theme of quality of life, which the magazine deals with and the mannerisms present in the encounter between its themes and specific journalistic practices and structures, the study here analyzes the editorial constitution of the publication and the concomitant establishment of a meaning about living well in society. In order to support the analytic course of this study, questions about the magazine and its journalistic style guide the study, seeking to conceptualize the particularity of the magazine beyond the themes it specializes in. Furthermore, the study contextualizes the magazine delimiting the role of how it historically matured into formulating its own characteristics and indicating how the encounter with the theme of quality of life agrees with certain market and social logics of the segmentation and mediatization of the contemporary scenario. In theoretical terms, the study deals with aspects that lead to a reflection in the direction of the tension between social reality and the magazines own style, intertwined by issues related to how journalism belongs to the present, how it deals with certain information demands and how it builds a specific type of knowledge about the world. From the systematic observation of the editorial projects and images of the contents worked on by the magazine and of the editorials published monthly, such as letters to the readers, one can draw reflections that reveal the magazine?s globality, conveying a movement that gives it a singularity we are calling revistação.