New free, up-scale magazine is geared to cities

Some 50,000 householders in San Francisco, Atlanta, Los Angeles, and San Diego got a new throwaway in the mail this month.

That's the junk-mail flash of the week? In this case, yes. The publication's name is Goodlife - and it's not the usual Thursday freebie shoppers' guide. This is an 80-page, slick-paper magazine in full color aimed each month at people with higher incomes. It will be absolutely free to recipients.

The idea for the up-scale periodical came out of demographic research done for the publishing organization by a Los Angeles firm. Names on the Goodlife mailing list are assembled from computerized census data which combine statistics on education, occupation, income brackets, home value, and city neighborhood locations.

The magazine, besides prestigious local advertising, includes articles by some of the nation's top writers in the fields of travel, food, fashion, restaurants, and home decorating.''

''We are unique,'' says Dick Brown, editor of the San Francisco edition, ''because we can give readers the best of two worlds: We are a city magazine - several, really - and we are also a national sheet. Our main articles will be national in scope, but our local staffs in each city will concentrate on stories about city events. And our advertisers pay the entire cost, because they believe Goodlife readers will respond well to this new special-interest approach.''

The November issue will circulate in 8 cities, with 18 others to be included next year. Goodlife's executives say the eventual goal for nationwide circulation is 2 million copies, covering 65 US cities.