Deconstruction of Heat magazine cover.

Gossip magazines are designed to exploit stories about celebrities to the public, usually to embarrass the celebrity or to portray them in a negative way. This is done for entertainment; the consumers of gossip magazines enjoy reading about gossip and to keep updated about the lives of celebrities.

In today's lesson, we analysed the front cover of Heat magazine (which is a gossip magazine published by Bauer). Like every other magazine, the front cover includes conventions which attract the customers to buy. One of the most common convention is the central image, this tends to be an embarrassing photo of the celebrity along with an engaging anchorage to lure the readers into buying the magazine. As you can see below, a picture of Lauren is used looking depressed with the quote "I can't stop eating..." as the anchorage. This is purposely chosen to be the central image because it attracts the customers to want to know more about the story.