Abstract
This mainly historical and theoretical chapter unpacks lifestyle journalism in a media institutional context, demonstrating how lifestyle journalism can be seen as one, among others, response to broader sociocultural transformations such as commercialisation, individualisation and digitalisation. First, we aim to show that lifestyle journalism today involves complex conceptualisations of the audience in line with those presented by ‘service journalism’, an umbrella term for softer types of journalism introduced in the 1980s and 1990s. Service journalism may serve as a useful pathway to the broad field of lifestyle journalism in terms of conceptualising the hybrid nature of audiences today. Second, we 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, including those associated more with hard news reporting. Using the relatively new journalistic practice of ‘constructive journalism’ to illustrate this argument, we point to the ways in which constructive journalism, in similar ways as lifestyle journalism, is rooted in processes of commercialisation, individualisation and digitalisation.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Lifestyle Journalism: Social Media, Consumption and Experience |
| Editors | Lucia Vodanovic |
| Number of pages | 13 |
| Publisher | Routledge |
| Publication date | 1 Jan 2019 |
| Chapter | 1 |
| Publication status | Published - 1 Jan 2019 |