Abstract
In the destabilized world of contemporary journalism, disruptive agents are easy enough to find. Digital dimes have replaced analog dollars. Gawker, BuzzFeed, and other sites push content chosen for maximum social reach rather than importance to the democratic process. Soft news and infotainment—also known as lifestyle journalism—predominate, increasingly blurring the lines between news and public relations, advertising, entertainment, and marketing.
Lifestyle Journalism, a collection of articles originally published in Journalism Studies, addresses what volume editor Folker Hanusch describes as the scholarly neglect of lifestyle journalism. Often derided and dismissed as insubstantial and commercially driven, Hanusch says, lifestyle journalism not only encompasses a broad range of subcategories (finance, fashion, arts and culture, travel, health and fitness, gardening, and interior design among them), but also plays a significant role in today’s increasingly complex media ecosystem. The nine articles in the volume contextualize, theorize, and otherwise explore what is often dismissed as something other than “real journalism.”
In the opening article, Hanusch, a former journalist and current lecturer at Australia’s University of the Sunshine Coast, sets the stage for the discussions that follow by defining lifestyle journalism, succinctly and reasonably, 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” and by rehearsing reasons for the field’s scholarly neglect. The second article, Elfriede Fürsich’s “Lifestyle Journalism as Popular Journalism: Strategies for Evaluating Its Public Role,” explores lifestyle journalism’s political and civic potential by suggesting ways in which it can be examined for its ideological dimensions (e.g., for its role in the social construction of race, class, and gender). The other articles focus more narrowly on specific subgenres in the field—travel, fashion, and health journalism, for example—and on major issues in those subgenres. An essay on the lifestyle magazine industry in China explores issues of professional autonomy and ethics in that industry’s increasingly open (and increasingly Westernized) media landscape; another looks at fashion blogging in the context of social media and the decentering of media authority.
Lifestyle Journalism’s strengths are many, but two stand out. Like other collections in Routledge’s Journalism Studies: Theory and Practice series, Lifestyle Journalism focuses on identifying key issues for ongoing research in specific and often overlooked fields. To that end, the articles surface a variety of possible theoretical approaches and research methodologies—from field interviews with journalists and editors to participant observation and content analysis of specific texts. Each article also includes a comprehensive list of scholarly references that provide a foundation for further study.
The collection is also impressive in its global reach. Of the nine essays, only one focuses on U.S. media (Nikki Usher’s “Service Journalism as Community Experience: Personal Technology and Personal Finance at the New York Times”). The rest are studies from across the globe with a special interest in the emerging lifestyle consumer markets in a rising Asia and Australasia.
“Bread and Circuses: Food Meets Politics in the Singapore Media” and “The Devil May Care: Travel Journalism, Cosmopolitan Concern, Politics and the Brand” merit mention here. Andrew Duffy and Yang Yuhong Ashley’s “Bread and Circuses” makes a case for the ways in which food writing has helped build national identity in Singapore’s multicultural and multiracial society. Taking Singapore’s national newspaper, The Straits Times, as the unit of analysis, the researchers offer a nuanced look at the way in which that newspaper’s food journalism helps negotiate the promotion of Asian values on the one hand and the desires to build a more Westernized society on the other.
Lyn McGaurr’s “The Devil May Care” provides a comprehensive case study of the interplay between travel journalists and public relations practitioners in Tasmania, the island state off Australia’s southern coast. Focusing on the period from the mid-1990s to 2010, McGuarr examines the ways in which government tourist offices continued their efforts to position Tasmania as an international tourist destination, especially for ecotourism, at the same time the international media provided ongoing coverage of the government’s controversial approval for logging in Tasmania’s old-growth forests. Working with travel and news stories, government publications, publicity material, and interviews with journalists and tourism officers, McGuarr shows that a country’s destination branding can indeed remain powerful in the face of controversy but that travel journalists are also able to mount “meaningful resistance”—in this case, reporting on both the country’s tourism trade and the environmental controversy that threatens to disrupt the landscape.
With its suggestions for further study and its identification of significant theoretical issues, the articles in Lifestyle Journalism would work well as part of a research methods course, especially a course that uses a cultural studies approach, or a course in global media studies. At a price of $145, though, it may be more a library purchase than a required course text.