The news increasingly provides help, advice, guidance, and information about the management of self and everyday life, in addition to its traditional role in political communication. Yet, such forms of journalism are still regularly denigrated in scholarly discussions, as they often deviate from normative ideals. This is particularly true in lifestyle journalism, where few studies have examined the impact of commercial influences. Through in-depth interviews with 89 Australian and German lifestyle journalists, this article explores the ways in which journalists experience how the lifestyle industries try to shape their daily work, and how these journalists deal with these influences. We find that lifestyle journalists are in a constant struggle over the control of editorial content, and their responses to increasing commercial pressures vary between resistance and resignation. This has implications for our understanding of journalism as a whole in that it broadens it beyond traditional conceptualizations associated with political journalism.

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Eine deutschlandweite Befragung von 556 Journalismus-Studierenden hat untersucht, ob und inwiefern sich die aktuelle Krise im Journalismus in der hochschulgebundenen Journalistenausbildung niederschlägt. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass unter den Studierenden keine ausgeprägte Krisenstimmung herrscht, auch wenn eine Mehrheit der Befragten die Zukunftschancen des Journalismus ambivalent bewertet. Die größten Herausforderungen für den Berufsstand werden in ökonomischen Faktoren sowie in verschlechterten Arbeitsbedingungen gesehen. Selbstverwirklichung und Idealismus haben angesichts der schwierigen Bedingungen einen entscheidenden Einfluss auf die Studienfachwahl. Darüber hinaus zeigt sich, dass trotz schwieriger Zeiten immer noch eine klare Mehrheit der Studierenden in den Journalismus möchte. Die Erfahrungen, die Studierende im redaktionellen Alltag machen, bestärkt sie dabei in ihrer Berufswahl und gibt ihnen zudem mehr Sicherheit hinsichtlich der Erreichbarkeit ihrer beruflichen Ziele. Gleichzeitig bereitet sich knapp die Hälfte der Studierenden im Geiste bereits darauf vor, in einem von beruflicher Mobilität gekennzeichneten Arbeitsmarkt irgendwann auch auf andere Tätigkeitsbereiche auszuweichen.

News is produced primarily to inform readers and viewers. However, audiences are charged only a fraction of the high production costs or not asked to pay at all. The reason is subsidy by advertising revenue. Since the beginning of professional journalism, news has been bundled with advertisements. This way, media companies can sell the attention of audiences attracted by journalistic content to advertising companies, which in return seek to attract consumers to their products and brands. Beyond distributing both simultaneously, advertising and journalism can intermingle, which causes ethical concerns. From a normative point of view, news and advertisements should be separated clearly in regard to the production process and the content itself. The separation of “church and state” or the “Chinese Wall” between the newsroom and the business side within a media company are commonly used metaphors used to express the ideal of separation. This principle aims to protect journalistic autonomy from economic influences such as advertising considerations. Nevertheless, advertising interests may influence journalism in different forms and to various degrees. They are regularly discussed as influence on journalistic selection of topics as well as writing style, and as the source of attempts to blend advertising and editorial content. Scholarly concerns are increasingly consumer oriented and less critical journalism, biased reporting on advertisers’ brands or products, and the potential deception of audiences, for example, when hybrid forms of advertising such as native ads camouflage their commercial nature. The relationship between journalism and advertising has been treated as an orphan compared to the relationship to public relations or politics. However, the media organizations’ struggles for sustainable business models in the 21st century fuel discussions in media economics and journalism studies about whether advertising is a blessing or curse to journalism. In a nutshell, the relationship between advertising and journalism is as long-standing as it is ambivalent (see “Evolution of the Relationship”). On the one hand, advertising revenue largely lays the financial foundation for prospering professional journalism (see “Funding Journalism”). On the other hand, this financial dependency causes potential threats to journalistic autonomy (see “Influencing Journalism”).

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This study investigates the visual objects that are used to either disclose or disguise the commercial nature of native advertising as news articles. We adopt a "material object" approach to explore the potential implications for journalism regarding transparency, trust, and credibility. Methodologically, this study used content analysis covering 21 publications in five countries: Germany, Israel, Norway, Spain, and Sweden. We analysed 373 individual native ads. The findings show that news outlets do not follow a consistent way to disclose native ads visually, negotiating the balance between transparency and deception. In this balance, news organizations do not boldly push for transparency and instead remain ambiguous. Our analyses show that both national and organizational characteristics matter when shaping the visual boundaries of journalism.