ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the applicability of sociologist Jean Baudrillard’s theories on simulation and hyperreality to magazines. We argue that magazines, through promoting particular lifestyles and products to specific groups of readers, play active roles in creating simulated presentations of reality, distributing images that constitute a desire-driven, simulated world. In particular, we consider how these concepts are evident in city magazines, a genre of U.S. publications focused on covering a particular city through a blend of service journalism and feature writing. Many city magazines emphasise idealised versions of cities in their content, resulting in the construction of hyperreal representations. Through a discourse analysis of restaurant reviews in award-winning U.S. city magazines, we find that food coverage, in particular, represents a fetishising or nostalgia for the lost object of authenticity and real needs. We conclude that city magazines construct an urban lifestyle for readers and provide instructions for how to live in it while also representing a simulated city that does not actually exist.
