A Study Of The Cover Image Of "New Sports" Magazine (1950-2018)

New sports was founded in July 1950.It is the earliest comprehensive sports journal in China.As the earliest sports magazine since the founding of the People’s Republic of China,its historical position is irreplaceable.It has influenced generations of sports people from different aspects in different historical periods since its birth.The cover is the essence of a magazine,carrying the historical story of an era,and the historical stages of each period are completely recorded by it.Therefore,the cover image is an important material for studying sports and history.The research on the cover image can’t be separated from the specific historical context.This powerful magazine is a kind of propaganda material with strong media ceremony color.It is endowed with dual significance.On the one hand,it is the transmission of the realistic basic information,on the other hand,it reflects the state of consciousness and the political demands of sports.In the past,the research on new sports usually started from the research on the text and characters of a certain period,and carried out qualitative analysis,mainly showing the changes of society or sports in a certain period.This paper takes all covers of the new sports magazine from July 1950 to 2018 as the research object,using content analysis and mathematical statistics,and combining the quantitative analysis and qualitative research of the cover image to explore the representation of the cover image communication of the new sports magazine.Based on the field theory of Pierre Bourdieu,a French sociologist,this paper divides image research into three fields: production field,composition field and communication field.The field of image production mainly refers to the technology and form of image production;the field of image composition mainly refers to the decoding and encoding of image symbols;the field of Image Propagation mainly refers to the mode and process of image propagation.It is found that the cover image of new sports magazine has certain stability for the selection of various types of image symbols at a certain stage,which is also the feature of its cover design.However,in today’s fragmented reading era,in the fierce competition of new media,the advantage of new sports magazine is no longer obvious,and it has lost its control over the mainstream national sports ideology.