Abstract
All studies of travel journalism must include a justification for the chosen topic. Why study travel media and not news journalism? That is true also of the edited volume Travel Journalism: Exploring Production, Impact and Culture. As the writers show, there are many reasons for analyzing this genre. The starting point is that the tourism industry as well as the amount of travel journalism has grown and that the research analyzing it has grown along with it. To study travel media is also more important given the fact that this kind of lifestyle journalism becomes more central when journalism as a whole is in an economic crisis. Travel journalism increasingly takes the place of foreign news.
Furthermore, tourism is described as pivotal for both modern and postmodern societies. Travel journalism and tourism are now about more than just leisure travel . It has also become an integral part of the branding efforts of cities and regions seeking to attract the right people.
Travel Journalism also takes its starting point in Fürsich and Kavoori’s (2001) seminal article on travel journalism, ‘Mapping a critical framework for the study of travel journalism’. The ambition is to provide an overview of contemporary research on travel journalism. How has the genre changed and how has the research changed? What are the main topics now? New topics for researchers to consider are of course digital media, such as user-generated reviews and blogs, but also issues of environmentalism, cosmopolitanism, and so-called dark tourism. The focus remains on Western travel media, but there is also one chapter about Chinese travel journalism.
Three of the chapters analyze digital media content from different perspectives. Authenticity, which has always been a main issue of the genre, can now be constructed through blogs and other forms of so-called social media that are presented as more independent alternatives to established commercial media. However, travel journalism has always been and still is a slippery genre. In digital media, the lines between professional and amateur can become blurred since a few successful bloggers also get their texts published in newspapers and magazines. There seems to be little difference between the most successful bloggers and professional freelance writers, other than that the bloggers at times can be a bit more critical, according to Raman and Choudary.
Analysis of online media always runs the risk of overstating the change brought on by digitalization. Many of the features that are discussed as typical of travel journalism online in, for example, Duffy’s chapter are rather characteristic of how the genre as a whole has transformed into lifestyle journalism (Ljungberg, 2012). That includes characteristics such as the focus on the writer, the use of a first-person viewpoint as well as the reliance on the emotions and experiences of the writer rather than expertise.
A recurring question in the study of travel journalism is whether the genre can express a cosmopolitan outlook and, if so, under which circumstances. Travel journalism has become more commercialized, but many researchers still attach hopes to the genre, imagining how it could be critical of tourism and independent of advertisers. However, it is difficult to see how travel journalism in general could express a transgressive cosmopolitan world view. As Cocking, among others, concludes, the representational tropes draw heavily on cultural expectations and a colonial heritage.
Only a few of the chapters give concrete examples of what the scholars consider to be good travel journalism. One example is Creech’s chapter about dark tourism in which he argues that some of the travel journalists that he studies are able to maintain a critical distance that highlights both their own role and the problematic aspects of tourism. Another example is the chapter by Buzinde et al. in which they analyze a travel show that they claim challenges stereotypes. More research is needed in order to discuss under which conditions travel journalists are able to have a critical viewpoint. Travel journalism still perpetuates old prejudices and stereotypes while it is simultaneously becoming more globalized. The main challenge in the analysis of the genre is to account for both change and continuity.
Travel Journalism is a timely collection of research that offers a wide variety of perspectives, theoretical standpoints and methodologies, reflecting the multifaceted field of research in tourism and travel journalism. The chapters cover aspects of production as well as representations. What is missing are perspectives on the readers. It is clear from the many pertinent unanswered questions that more research is needed. One can only hope that in the future the study of travel journalism will be able to do without the justifications.