Abstract
The notion of “lifestyle journalism” is sometimes met with derision by researchers and reporters. They quickly point out the difference between “hard” news, a precursor to an enlightened citizenry, versus “soft” news, essentially infotainment that has led to a dumbing down of the masses. Lifestyle journalism falls into the latter category.
But the works presented in this collection 1 suggest perhaps lifestyle journalism is an area open for scholarly inquiry and a legitimate part of the journalistic story. Here, University of the Sunshine Coast, Australia, Senior Lecturer in Journalism Folker Hanusch has edited the works of eleven scholars who have found novel ways of using cultural and comparative studies in lifestyle journalism to suggest so.
Hanusch begins with a common definition of lifestyle journalism 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” (p. 4).
Using this as the starting point, one readily places the purpose and content of lifestyle journalism as a daily offering of American newspapers going back to the inclusion of “women’s pages” of the late 1800s. The twentieth-century rise of the consumer culture, advertisers’ demands, and increased leisure time logically expanded the place for lifestyle journalism.
Researchers Nete Nørgaard Kristensen and Unni From (“Lifestyle Journalism: Blurring the Boundaries”) find similar lifestyle and cultural content going back to the 1890s in Denmark. Their work illustrates the strength of this collection: It includes studies from seven countries on four continents—Europe, Africa, Asia, and North America.
There is much in this book to explore. For example, Agnès Rocamora (“Hypertextuality and Remediation in the Fashion Media: The Case of Fashion Blogs,” pp. 91–105) supplies a cultural examination of fashion blogging that brings together disparate notions such as hypertextuality, rhizomes, and remediation.
Just as hypertextuality permanently blends the distinction between being “inside” and “outside” a text, so too have fashion bloggers taken on the sacrosanct fashion magazines such as Vogue or Harper’s Bazaar, literally taking their reports to and from the street. A rhizome, which is always moving, always changing, defines the very concept of “fashion” itself. And both “old” (traditional magazines) and “new media” (fashion blogs) remediate; both reflect and change one another.
Remediation is also seen in Roel Puijk’s “Health and Lifestyle to Serve the Public: A Case Study of a Cross-Media Programme Series from the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation,” (pp. 74–90). Puijk finds a significant impact of the addition of online programming onto the highly watched original television program Puls. Within short order, the online component became more than plus content. It became instead an independent source citizens could turn to for in-depth news and factual information about health; the television program became more lifestyle oriented.
Elfriede Fürsich (“Lifestyle Journalism as Popular Journalism: Strategies for Evaluating Its Public Role,” pp. 11–24) uses an explanatory approach to examine the ideological roles both travel and music journalism play in public discussions of globalization and the role of the “Other.”
The other and the exotic are at the core of Lyn McGaurr’s “The Devil May Care: Travel Journalism, Cosmopolitan Concern, Politics and the Brand” (pp. 41–57). She uses the case study approach to follow Tasmanian tourism during a twenty-year environmental conflict and uncovers an interesting relationship among travel journalists, governments of so-called “destination brands,” and public relations practitioners. While government officials may sometimes so value the brand endorsement of travel journalists that they are willing to host the trips, officials cannot assume the journalists will support the brand without criticism.
Researchers Andrew Duffy and Yang Yuhong Ashley (“Bread and Circuses: Food Meets Politics in the Singapore Media,” pp. 58–73) study how the government of Singapore has used food to create the national identity of that Southeast Asian country. Through a content analysis of food stories in both hard news and lifestyle features in The Straits Times, Duffy and Ashley are able to identify major themes that are reflections of Singaporean identity, including a culture of self-improvement, cosmopolitanism, and ethnic-cultural elements.
Shuang Li presents interesting interview findings on how changes in Chinese culture during the past twenty years have created a new professionalism among lifestyle magazine journalists. (“A New Generation of Lifestyle Magazine Journalism in China: The Professional Approach,” pp. 121–36). These journalists are younger and self-identify—perhaps somewhat in jest—more with the term “worker” than the term “journalist” (p. 126). Nonetheless, they see “social responsibility” as the most valued ethic in their working standards and describe the functions of journalism as being an “information vehicle” in the “service of the rising class,” “independent from media ownership and commercial forces,” and “contributing consumerism to culture and traditional society” (p. 133).
The U.S.’s only case study is produced by Nikki Usher in “Service Journalism as Community Experience: Personal Technology and Personal Finance at The New York Times” (pp. 106–20). The personal finance and technology writers have incorporated online platforms such as Twitter and their internal blogs, she observes, to create a new type of “service journalism.” Without sacrificing notions of journalistic rigor, these writers and columnists have introduced a form of networked journalism in which their readers/consumers are now co-creators of content. Online readers can suggest ideas for inquiry, ask questions of experts, get answers from them or from other readers, and crowd source stories. All of this, in turn, has created a new form of professional partnerships among journalists and their online readers, blog contributors, and social media followers. They have become members of a “community,” one based on mutually beneficial exchanges of knowledge and information.
Overall, the global approach taken by the studies in Lifestyle Journalism is noteworthy in an interconnected, mediated world. And, the studies’ originality is often impressive. But perhaps the book’s greatest strength is that it might provide many avenues for future exploration into the historical, cultural, and comparative impact of lifestyle journalism.