Current literature examining journalism’s boundary work has focused mostly on traditional, hard news journalism, while soft news journalism, such as lifestyle journalism, has largely been overlooked. Guided by the framework of boundary work, this paper examines how traditional fashion journalists and fashion bloggers define their own professionalism and what that says about the negotiation of fashion journalism’s boundaries. Through a textual analysis of the ‘About’ pages of 40 mainstream fashion magazine websites and fashion blogs, this paper shows that fashion magazines and fashion blogs demonstrate differences in four areas: mode of presentation, rituals of asserting authority, organisational structure, and relationship with the audience. For each theme, fashion magazine websites and fashion blogs display different approaches that help to shape their professional identities. These four areas serve as markers of the emerging – and perhaps blurring – boundaries between the two media actors. Findings from this study have implications not just on boundary work in journalism, but also on the very definitions of journalist and journalism, and on the evolving digital cultural industry, particularly in relation to lifestyle-centred content.
Guided by boundary work (Carlson, 2015; Carlson & Lewis, 2019), this study aims to better understand where lifestyle journalists situate digital lifestyle influencers within the field of lifestyle journalism, and what types of boundary-making strategies these journalists employ in reaction to such influencers. Through 37 interviews with lifestyle journalists from Singapore, the findings show that the journalists view the influencers as functional interlopers, and have an uneasy “frenemy” relationship with them. The interviewees engage in expansion, expulsion, and protection of autonomy boundary strategies (Carlson, 2015; Carlson & Lewis, 2019), but these are enacted at different times in response to different aspects of influencers. Overall, this study lends insight into how lifestyle journalists discursively construct the boundaries of their field against the incursion of digital lifestyle influencers.
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