Lifestyle Journalism Research Articles

Food for Thought in Restaurant Reviews

Coverage of food journalism has increased in contemporary media and restaurant reviews are a regular feature in newspapers. The reaction to a rating of zero for a restaurant in The Weekend Australian newspaper in 2016 highlighted the role and expectations of critics. It also raised the issue of whether this form of lifestyle journalism included traditional journalistic objectives, or was influenced more by commercial factors. In this environment, it is therefore valuable to explore whether restaurant reviews are more aligned with detached journalism or an extension of marketing. Utilising a content analysis, this pilot study examines the ratings of food critics in four broadsheet/quality newspapers in Australia and the United Kingdom. During the three years of the data collection, 550 restaurant reviews were coded. The pattern of review marks suggested more supportive judgements than critical ones, and was consistent with the softer side of journalism.

Journalistic Roles and Everyday Life

Having been neglected by journalism scholars in the past, recent years have seen renewed interest in journalism’s role in everyday life, in addition to the traditional focus on journalism’s relationship with politics. In particular, a growing body of work is concerned with the practices, content and distribution of lifestyle journalism. Yet, there are still large gaps in our knowledge of the field in terms of how lifestyle journalists themselves think about their work and their role in society. Based on an online survey of more than 600 Australian lifestyle journalists, this article identifies four key roles that these journalists see themselves as fulfilling: service providers, life coaches, community advocates and inspiring entertainers. These dimensions tie into recent theorizations about journalistic roles and everyday life, and not only enhance our understanding of lifestyle journalism, but more importantly contribute to a better recognition of journalism’s role in society. Further, the article explores some key determinants for differences in the way journalists value the four roles, identifying economic aspects on the organizational level, as well as specializations within lifestyle journalism as key areas of influence.

News Values Go on Holiday

The “newsworthiness” of news continues to be an issue of great importance within the field of journalism studies—as the 2016 Journalism Studies article by Harcup and O’Neill [“What is News? News Values Revisited (Again)”] attests. However, the question of what makes the news the news has been pursued, almost exclusively, in the context of mainstream news events and political reporting. The values that underpin other forms of journalism have as yet received little academic attention. This paper seeks to explore the “news values” of British travel journalism. As a form of lifestyle journalism, travel features arguably lack the political relevance and importance of their “hard” news counter-parts. Nonetheless, given its close alliance to the world’s largest industry (tourism), this paper argues that the underlying ideological values of travel journalism are significant and worthy of study for what they reveal of the representational and narrative features of the genre, as well as the cultural and economic context in which it is produced. As an exploratory investigation, the aim is to identify and compile a preliminary taxonomy of “news values” specific to the genre of travel journalism.

Goodbye politics, hello lifestyle Changing news topics in tabloid, quality and local newspaper websites in the U.K. and Sweden from 2002 to 2012

Although considerable efforts have studied online news, studies so far have not investigated how the actual news topics are affected by digitalization in general, if at all, or compared them to different media constructs. Instead, changes in content are assumed or illustrated anecdotally rather than systematically assessed. This empirical study, covering Swedish and UK news sites within tabloid, quality morning, and local/regional varieties between 2002 and 2012, shows that there is a tabloidization effect in general but that it is stronger in tabloids and in Sweden compared to the UK. Further, this tabloidization can be more precisely described as a shift from political to more lifestyle journalism, as it is in the areas where the prime growth and decline are found. In addition, the study reveals that it is the slower news that increases most suggesting that the immediate character of online news is mediated by production conditions

The GamerGate controversy and journalistic paradigm maintenance

GamerGate is a viral campaign that became an occasion, particularly from August 2014 to January 2015, to both question journalistic ethics and badger women involved in game development and gaming criticism. Gaming journalists thus found themselves managing a debate on two fronts: defending the probity of gaming journalism and remediating attacks on women. This study explores how gaming journalists undertook paradigm maintenance in the midst of the controversy. This was analyzed through interviews with gaming journalists as well as a discourse analysis of the texts responding to GamerGate that were produced by their publications. Although gaming journalists operate within a form of lifestyle journalism, the journalists repaired their paradigm by linking their work to traditional journalism and emphasizing a paternal role.

‘How much love are you going to give this brand?’ Lifestyle journalists on commercial influences in their work

The news increasingly provides help, advice, guidance, and information about the management of self and everyday life, in addition to its traditional role in political communication. Yet, such forms of journalism are still regularly denigrated in scholarly discussions, as they often deviate from normative ideals. This is particularly true in lifestyle journalism, where few studies have examined the impact of commercial influences. Through in-depth interviews with 89 Australian and German lifestyle journalists, this article explores the ways in which journalists experience how the lifestyle industries try to shape their daily work, and how these journalists deal with these influences. We find that lifestyle journalists are in a constant struggle over the control of editorial content, and their responses to increasing commercial pressures vary between resistance and resignation. This has implications for our understanding of journalism as a whole in that it broadens it beyond traditional conceptualizations associated with political journalism.

Political Participation and Pleasure in Green Lifestyle Journalism

This article examines the reportage of green lifestyle practices across the online sites of major British newspapers. The articulation of “green lifestyle journalism” in the study is suggestive of its complex identity, given its implication in existing orders of consumption while also expressive of emerging everyday practices that potentially and variously challenge those orders of consumption. The study enquires into whether such green lifestyle journalism stories are, in fact, reported across different online sites, and if so, in which publications and how such stories are classified within online menus. It also examines the range of reported environmental lifestyle practices and how they are attributed with meaning, including their engagement with the concept of pleasure and its association with political participation. The study reveals that the pleasures associated with sustainable living are often marginalized, and instead an ethical consumer is commonly posited who is variously cognitively deficient, worried about the environmental consequences of their everyday behavior, or concerned about their inability to realize their desires to engage in sustainable lifestyle practices. The article also examines those instances when the pleasures of a more sustainable lifestyle are represented as deriving from the implementation of environmental practices and technologies in everyday, domestic contexts, and also when they are illustrated as the product of civic and political engagements with issues of sustainability.

Book Review: Lifestyle Journalism, edited by Folker Hanusch

Book Review: <i>Lifestyle Journalism</i>, edited by Folker Hanusch

Book Review: Lifestyle Journalism, edited by Folker Hanusch

Book Review: <i>Lifestyle Journalism</i>, edited by Folker Hanusch

Mediating orientation and self-expression in the world of consumption: Australian and German lifestyle journalists’ professional views

Despite having experienced rapid popularity over the past two decades, lifestyle journalism is still somewhat neglected by academic researchers. So far mostly explored as either part of wider lifestyle programming, particularly on television, or in terms of individual sub-fields, such as travel, fashion or food journalism, lifestyle journalism is in need of scholarly analysis particularly in the area of production, based on the increasing importance which the field has in influencing audiences’ ways of life. This study explores the professional views of 89 Australian and German lifestyle journalists through in-depth interviews in order to explore the ways in which they engage in processes of influencing audiences’ self-expression, identities and consumption behaviors. The article argues that through its work, lifestyle journalism is a significant shaper of identities in today’s consumer societies.

LIFESTYLE JOURNALISM AS POPULAR JOURNALISM

This essay argues that lifestyle journalism, which is often considered trivial, should be analyzed for its public potential. I delineate how lifestyle journalism's dimensions of review, advice, and commercialism can be transformed into strategies for research that probe the social, cultural and economic context of this media output. Then I discuss how its discourse is worth analyzing for its ideological connection. John Fiske's ideas on “popular news” and Irene Costera Meijer's concept of “public quality” are presented as guidelines for interrogating the public relevance of this type of journalism. Findings from studies on the globalization discourse in travel journalism and music journalism are used to exemplify this research framework.

BROADENING THE FOCUS

This introduction to the special issue outlines the case for an increased focus on studying lifestyle journalism, an area of journalism which, despite its rapid rise over recent decades, has not received much attention from scholars in journalism studies. Criticised for being antithetical to public interest and watchdog notions of journalism, lifestyle journalism is still ridiculed by some as being unworthy of being associated with the term journalism. However, in outlining the field's development and a critique of definitions of journalism, this paper argues that there are a number of good reasons for broadening the focus. In fact, lifestyle journalism—here defined as a distinct journalistic field that primarily addresses its audiences as consumers, providing them with factual information and advice, often in entertaining ways, about goods and services they can use in their daily lives—has much to offer for scholarly inquiry and is of increasing relevance for society.

LIFESTYLE JOURNALISM

The article argues that, in contemporary journalism, the boundaries between lifestyle journalism and cultural journalism are blurring. The discussions of the article are based in comprehensive empirical studies, more specifically a content analysis of the coverage of lifestyle, culture and consumption in the Danish printed press during the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first; and secondly, interviews with Danish cultural journalists and editors. The studies reveal that the coverage of lifestyle is expanding and that culture, lifestyle and consumption are today contiguous—sometimes even inseparable—subject matters, which even for journalists are difficult to separate. The findings are interpreted in the light of especially Jansson's approach to mediatization of consumption as an expression of more general socio- and media cultural transformations of society.

BREAD AND CIRCUSES

While there has been consistent academic interest in the link between the media and politics, this attention has mostly bypassed lifestyle journalism. Yet this can reflect the political and social realities of a country if less clearly than more overtly political coverage. This paper seeks to demonstrate how the Singapore government has used food to help construct a national identity and how the local print media have been a partner in this. It analyses how food has been represented in the Singapore press in relation to attitudes that contribute to nation-building. The findings suggest that the food-related articles studied usually reflected a culture of self-improvement, an ethnic-cultural element and cosmopolitan attitudes, all of which were identified as touchstones of Singapore's government-approved national identity. In addition, there is also marginally more press coverage of cosmopolitan and foreign food compared to local food, in concurrence with government initiatives to place the country as a globalised hub.

Travel journalists’ attitudes toward public relations: Findings from a representative survey

The impact of public relations on emerging fields such as travel journalism has not gained much attention, despite the broader growth of lifestyle journalism, and its particular dependence on PR. This study reports the findings of a representative survey of Australian travel journalists, focusing on their views of PR. Results show that travel journalists are wary of PR, although they believe they can be relatively immune from its influence and see some PR activities as quite useful. Cluster analysis identifies three distinct groups based on their views of PR, which range from a positive attitude to strong criticism. Their backgrounds and differences are explored, pointing to gender, job status, and background in mainstream journalism as main determinants for differences.

Representations of Foreign Places outside the News: An Analysis of Australian Newspaper Travel Sections

Despite continued growth over recent decades, travel journalism has so far gained little attention in journalism research, with scholars often ridiculing it and other forms of lifestyle journalism as not being ‘real’ journalism. This article aims to shift the focus by arguing that non-news journalism is becoming increasingly important as a site for research. It reports the results of a content analysis of Australian newspaper travel sections and examines the role they play in mediating foreign places. The results demonstrate that travel stories mostly can be classed as service stories in that they focus on destinations that are already popular with Australians. At the same time, they report very little about local cultures at the destinations, demonstrating a focus on the tourist experience and representing a missed opportunity for improving intercultural understanding. A visual analysis of photographs shows stereotypical portrayals of destinations broadly in line with tourism promotion materials.

The reading of cultural and lifestyle journalism

Based on analyses of 25 qualitative individual interviews with readers from different demographic backgrounds, this article investigates how readers experience and use journalism on culture in both online and print press. I argue that the use of journalism on culture is constituted within different reading positions. These reading positions are characterized not only as objectively and ideologically determined categories (Hall 1973), but also as subjectively constituted (Schrder 2000) ways for audiences to negotiate personal and professional interests related to their engagement in the (cultural) public sphere (Couldry et al 2007) and the media they choose to use. Different reading patterns result from the ways in which readers negotiate and use different texts and textual elements (e.g. critical debate in a review) for different purposes (e.g. relaxation, entertainment, information, education etc.). Thus, the article explores whether and how the use of journalism on culture is interrelated with more universal processes of meaning production, and therefore it draws on a socio-cognitive perspective, especially in regard to schemes of expectation and experience (e.g. Bruun 2004; Waldahl 1998; Engebretsen 1998).

THE DIMENSIONS OF TRAVEL JOURNALISM

Much of the existing empirical research on journalism focuses largely on hard-news journalism, at the expense of its less traditional forms, particularly the soft-news areas of lifestyle and entertainment journalism. In focusing on one particular area of lifestyle journalism—the reporting of travel stories—this paper argues for renewed scholarly efforts in this increasingly important field. Travel journalism's location at the intersection between information and entertainment, journalism and advertising, as well as its increasingly significant role in the representation of foreign cultures makes it a significant site for scholarly research. By reviewing existing research about travel journalism and examining in detail the special exigencies that constrain it, the article proposes a number of dimensions for future research into the production practices of travel journalism. These dimensions include travel journalism's role in mediating foreign cultures, its market orientation, motivational aspects and its ethical standards.