‘How much love are you going to give this brand?’ Lifestyle journalists on commercial influences in their work

Abstract

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.

Journalistic Roles and Everyday Life

“…While we find an overall domination of economic influences and a preference for providing entertainment and inspiration, there do exist slightly different and at times competing logics in the field of lifestyle journalism, an aspect already noted in earlier qualitative work (Hanusch and Hanitzsch 2013;Hanusch, Hanitzsch, and Lauerer 2017). Importantly, too, this study found that individual-level variables played only a minor role in impacting the extent to which respondents support certain roles.…”

“…These three items were drawn from Obermaier, Koch, and Riesmeyer's (2015) study in order to assess the economic context on the organizational level. Economic context and platforms have been considered important considerations in differences among lifestyle journalists (Hanusch, Hanitzsch, and Lauerer 2017). Finally, to examine the influence of the specific beats that lifestyle journalists worked for-a potentially important criterion for influencing role perceptions (Hanusch and Hanitzsch 2013)-respondents were asked to identify which of the following 11 areas of lifestyle journalism they normally worked in: travel; fashion and beauty; health, wellness and fitness; food, cuisine and cooking; living and gardening; parenting and family; people and celebrity; personal technology; personal finance; property and real estate; and music and movies.…”

“…While this analysis of journalistic roles related to everyday life complicates our understanding of journalistic roles more broadly, the regression analysis has further shown important distinctions that need to be made even within the lifestyle journalism field, an aspect which Hanusch, Hanitzsch, and Lauerer (2017) had already noted based on indepth interviews. Key criteria here are the level of competition that journalistic organizations find themselves in, with higher competition resulting in stronger support for all roles except that of the life coach.…”

Rethinking Constructive Journalism by Means of Service Journalism

“…In line with these definitions, "lifestyle journalism" is, by Hanusch and Hanitzsch, defined as "the journalistic coverage of the expressive values and practices that help create and signify a specific identity within the realm of consump-tion and everyday life" (2013,947). Hanusch (2017) shows that lifestyle journalists see it as their role to be service providers, life coaches, community advisors and inspiring entertai-ners, while Hanusch, Hanitzsch, and Lauerer (2017) emphasize the often very close ties to market interests in lifestyle journalism. Also the literature on "consumer journalism" points to the complex nature of this journalistic subfield because it traverses traditional topical dis-tinctions by covering politics, economy, business as well as consumer goods and lifestyle products by means of investigative journalism techniques and uncritical product presenta-tions on the fringes of branded content (e.g.…”

“…More-over, service journalism has often been associated with very close ties to consumption and the market (e.g. Hanusch, Hanitzsch, and Lauerer 2017;Kristensen and From 2012). Constructive journalism has, on the contrary, been associated with hard news and thus the political public sphere, and it has been developed not in the popular or tabloid press but in (Danish) public service media.…”