Lifestyle Journalism

Social Media, Consumption and Experience

Lucia Vodanovic

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781351123365
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Computer Science

Ranging from travel to wellbeing and fashion to food, Lifestyle Journalism explores a wide variety of subjects within a growing field.

This edited collection examines the complex dynamics of the ever-evolving media environment of lifestyle journalism, encompassing aspects of consumerism, entertainment and cosmopolitanism, as well as traditional journalistic practices. Through detailed case studies and research, the book discusses themes of consumer culture, identity, representation, the sharing economy and branding while bringing in important new aspects such as social media and new cultural intermediaries. International and cross-disciplinary, the book is divided into four parts: emerging roles; experience and identity in lifestyle media; new players and lifestyle actors; and lifestyle consumerism and brands.

Featuring case studies from a variety of countries including Turkey, the US, Chile and the UK, this is an important resource for journalism students and academics.

PART I

Emerging roles of lifestyle journalism

1

UNPACKING LIFESTYLE JOURNALISM VIA SERVICE JOURNALISM AND CONSTRUCTIVE JOURNALISM

Unni From and Nete Nørgaard Kristensen

Lifestyle journalism has often been defined as a specific journalistic beat of a softer nature. Lifestyle media content covers consumer-related topics such as travel, fashion, beauty, health, fitness, food, gardening, parenting, celebrity and personal technology (e.g. Bell and Hollows, 2005, p. 9). Moreover, it has been connected to “the journalistic coverage of the expressive values and practices that help create and signify a specific identity within the realm of consumption and everyday life” (Hanusch and Hanitzsch, 2013, p. 947). In this chapter, we focus on lifestyle journalism as a specific approach in journalism (see From and Kristensen, 2018), influenced by three strong sociocultural developments: commercialisation, individualisation and digitalisation. In combination with media institutional changes, these transformations have influenced journalistic sub-fields across the traditional distinction between hard and soft news. Approaches associated with lifestyle journalism, such as guidance, service, ‘feel good’ and empowerment news, have more recently been adopted within more traditional hard news reporting.

To analyse these new relations between soft news and hard news, we first unpack lifestyle journalism in a media institutional context to demonstrate how lifestyle journalism is one of various responses to the broader sociocultural transformations of commercialisation, individualisation and digitalisation. The main focus is on lifestyle journalism in the news media and in the press in particular, but with connections to lifestyle media in a broader sense across media types. We aim to show that lifestyle journalism is not only characterised by addressing the audience as consumers but also involves more complex conceptualisations of the audience in line with notions of the audience presented by service journalism, an umbrella term for softer types of journalism introduced in the 1980s and 1990s. Service journalism is characterised by a strong emphasis on guiding and empowering the audience to deal with problem solving in modern life. Thus, second, we show how service journalism may serve as a useful pathway to the broad field of lifestyle journalism in terms of conceptualising the hybrid nature of audiences as part citizens, part consumers and part clients (Eide and Knight, 1999; Eide, 2017). However, we also argue that the intentions of service and lifestyle journalism to guide audiences and focus on positive problem solving have more recently migrated to other journalistic fields. To exemplify this argument, we, third, examine how approaches typically associated with lifestyle journalism are adopted in some parts of hard news reporting. Taking our point of departure in a relatively new journalistic practice, constructive journalism, we analyse how such stories in some cases incorporate stylistic formats from service journalism and lifestyle journalism and argue that the fields are in similar ways rooted in processes of commercialisation, individualisation and digitalisation.

Research context

Lifestyle journalism has long been a well-established sub-field within Western news institutions. Even though lifestyle journalism is often associated with entertainment and leisure, it is now present across print and digital newspaper sections—from the main news section, to the business section and in supplements addressing topics of everyday life, life politics or sub-political subjects (From, 2010, 2018). Lifestyle topics have also had a strong presence on television, including public service media, especially since the 1990s (e.g. Brunsdon, 2003; O’Sullivan, 2005). Lifestyle content is popular with audiences and producers (Bell and Hollows, 2005) and a profitable area of journalism (e.g. Hanusch, 2017).

Lifestyle journalism and the growth of lifestyle media content have often been viewed in scholarly debates as an example of the tabloidization of journalism or the weakening of journalism as an important democratic institution (see Brunsdon, 2003; Kristensen and From, 2012). Franklin argues that “the task of journalism has become merely to deliver and serve up what the customer wants; rather like a deep-pan pizza” (1997, p. 5). Journalism outside the realm of the political domain is a neglected research area, resulting in “comparatively little knowledge about its structures, processes of production, content and effects it may have on audiences” (Hanusch, 2012, p. 3). Compared to studies of the development of journalism more generally, comprehensive historical analyses of the development of lifestyle journalism are more sporadic or even non-existent (From, 2018). However, lifestyle journalism may be regarded as a reflection of the development of modern democracies based on liberal and capitalist ideologies (Hartley, 1996, 1999; see also From, 2018) and the changed relations between media institutions, market, society and consumers. As such, lifestyle journalism may be seen as an integrated part of the development of modern journalism, because it reflects the social reality and provides sense-making practices of modernity (Hartley, 1999). Therefore, the historical development of lifestyle journalism as a specific beat and as a specific mode of addressing audiences is an important point of departure for scholarly enquiries into the field.

Commercialisation as a driving force in lifestyle journalism

Commercialisation is a prominent perspective that has often been associated with lifestyle media content in general and lifestyle journalism more specifically (e.g. From, 2018). The importance of lifestyle media content is tied to consumerism, consumption and the rise of industrial societies in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and later the shift from modernity to postmodernity or late capitalism (Bell and Hollows, 2005, pp. 2–3). The industrial revolution opened up new markets and made more consumer goods available to the developing middle class, i.e., made “the relative democratisation of consumption” possible (Lewis, 2008, p. 28). Advertisers saw newspapers as useful platforms for marketing consumer goods, and media institutions saw advertising as a source to finance the production and distribution of editorial content, advertising became an inevitable part of the news industry (Barnhurst and Nerone, 2001; From, 2018).

The literature on lifestyle journalism demonstrates that commercialism takes different shapes as a driving force in the development of the beat during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (e.g. From, 2018). Two examples can be highlighted: even though newspapers began to cover more popular culture forms in the eighteenth century, the coverage was characterised by an instrumental approach to audiences. Lewis (2008) argues that lifestyle content in the early phases was more formalistic and practically oriented. The coverage of food, for example, focused on how to get the most out of ingredients (Jones and Taylor, 2013). By the 1980s and 1990s, the interplay of commercialisation and individualisation, as we demonstrate below, meant that lifestyle journalism became a matter of taste and cultural identity more than solely a matter of consumption. Brunsdon (2003, p. 10) shows that in the mid-twentieth century, British hobby programmes on television were mainly didactic, providing instructions on ‘how to’, while the lifestyle programmes of the 1990s and onwards combined ‘instruction and spectacle’ as the make-over element became a centre of attention.

Commercialisation has thus constituted an important element of lifestyle journalism all along and has generally triggered an interest in the private sphere and provided more engaging ways of addressing the audience, as is also the case with constructive journalism (see below). The genres and modes of address in lifestyle journalism are often inspired by the language used in advertising. The more recent emergence of advertorials and branded content, which are particularly pronounced in lifestyle journalism (e.g. Eckman and Lindlof, 2003; Zhou, 2012), exemplify this. Hanusch also emphasises the private sphere and entertainment as important features when defining 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” (2012, p. 2). Accordingly, research has often pointed to commercial influences as a critical element of the journalistic profession and of lifestyle journalism in particular. Using travel journalism as an example, Fürsich argues that many have criticised the “poor state of travel journalism and its dependency on free trips and giveaways” (2012, p. 15). At the same time, lifestyle journalism’s “connection to the current unique historic socio-political situation” (Fürsich, 2012, p. 15) makes it relevant as a source of inspiration in the development of journalism practice more generally, as the case of constructive journalism also demonstrates.

In summary, commercialisation is more generally a key characteristic of late modernity and has, by extension, been a driving force in the development of the media industry and journalism during the twentieth century. The development of lifestyle journalism exemplifies media institutions’ acknowledgement of commercialism, consumerism and consumption as important to their audiences and to their business models. As we demonstrate in the following sections, devoted to service journalism and constructive journalism, changed market conditions in conjunction with social and technological change compelled journalism to re-invent itself in the 1980s and at the beginning of the twenty-first century, reiterating and renewing lifestyle journalism.

Individualisation and changed audience conceptions

Other theoretical perspectives often applied to explain the development of lifestyle journalism are individualisation and late modern processes of de-traditionalisation or disembedding (Beck, 1992; see Hanusch and Hanitzsch, 2013, p. 945). Individualisation marks a fundamental social change beyond but related to commercialisation and the development of a capitalist society, which has attached great importance to lifestyle media components especially from the 1980s and onwards, because lifestyle content provides the individual with the opportunities to choose values and identity detached from class and family ties. Such processes of individualisation are reflected in lifestyle content and modes of addressing the audiences.

In terms of content, lifestyle journalism and marketing material on lifestyle issues have placed greater emphasis on aesthetic representations and consumer goods as markers of taste cultures, pointing to the close ties between lifestyle products and cultural tastes and identities. Lewis (2008, p. 35), for example, argues that the symbolic and cultural dimensions of consumption became dominant features of lifestyle media from the 1980s and onwards. Popular culture and lifestyle issues were and continue to be covered in their own right, acknowledged as an important part of identity formation and “self-styling” (Lewis, 2008, p. 35) or “self-authorship” (Raisborough, 2011, p. 21). Hanusch and Hanitzsch (2013, p. 945) also point to the formative elements of lifestyle, as they adopt Chaneys’ conceptualisation of lifestyles as “patterns of action that differentiate people” and argue that contemporary lifestyle has formative, reflexive and articulative dimensions.

Processes of commercialisation and individualisation have also influenced the modes of addressing the audience. As argued above, commercialisation led to an increased journalistic and commercial attention to the personal and the private sphere. In parts of the scholarly debates, this has been viewed as a sign of consumerism replacing citizenship (e.g. Eide and Knight, 1999, p. 536). However, in the last decades of the twentieth century, lifestyle journalism also developed along with more complex understandings of the audience, applying a service-oriented way of guiding the public in the complex late-modern (consumer) society (Eide and Knight, 1999; Hjarvard, 1995). Eide and Knight have introduced the notion of service journalism, which is a term that encompasses how media institutions increasingly combined modes of address in particular types of journalism directed towards audiences with a hybrid identity. They argue that service journalism reflects a more advanced individualism that “embraces aspects of the citizen (rights) and the consumer (self-interest) mediated through the subjectivity of the client whose relation to self and to others, especially those who inform and advise, is shaped by the ethics of responsibility” (Eide and Knight, 1999, p. 542). The identity of ‘citizen’ adheres to traditional ideas about journalism, democracy and audiences; the identity of ‘consumers’ links to audiences as consumers of both lifestyle goods and media content; and the identity of ‘client’ is linked to professional media taking on the role of advising audiences to solve and act on everyday life problems.

The 2018-story series ‘Seven ways to’ in The Guardian exemplifies this, as it takes its point of departure in (public) lifestyle and health issues but advises individuals on how to cope with them, e.g. ‘Seven ways to deal with post-traumatic stress disorder’ (Robinson, 23 July 2018), ‘Seven ways to improve your balance’ (Carter, 16 July 2018), or ‘Seven ways to minimise the risk of having a stroke’ (Robinson, 11 June 2018). This conceptualisation links service journalism to broader political and economic issues and structures of public relevance and not merely the social and personal problems of individuals. From a media institutional perspective, individualisation, combined with commercialisation, thus manifests itself by an increasing audience orientation and segmentation. The increase in lifestyle sections and lifestyle programming exemplifies how news media used lifestyle and cultural coverage to build distinct media brands and segment audiences in the increasingly competitive media market of the 1980s and 1990s (Bell and Hollows, 2005; Kristensen and From, 2012, 2015).

All in all, service journalism points to a hybrid social role for journalists, serving both the consumer and the citizen as a continuum rather than as distinct or separate categories (From, 2018; From and Kristensen, 2018). It also suggests that processes of individualism have led to a promotionally driven kind of lifestyle journalism and a service-oriented kind of lifestyle journalism. However, as will be outlined below, commercialisation and individualisation also constitute important contexts for newer and broader developments in journalism in the digital media landscape, as exemplified by constructive journalism.

Lifestyle journalism in a digitalised media landscape

In the contemporary digital media environment, institutionalised media compete with numerous news and lifestyle content providers, producing and sharing such content on digital media platforms. Ordinary people express their views and opinions about lifestyle and consumption on vlogs and social media; semi-professional communicators, such as social media influencers or micro-bloggers (e.g. Maares and Hanusch, 2018), provide both original and br...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• Introduction: lifestyle journalism: social media, consumption and experience
• PART I: Emerging roles of lifestyle journalism
• PART II. Experience, consumption and identity
• PART III: New players and lifestyle actors
• PART IV: Lifestyle, consumerism and branding
• Index