The dimensions of travel journalism : exploring new fields for journalism research beyond the news

Much of the existing empirical research on journalism focuses largely on hard-news journalism, at the expense of its less traditional forms, particularly the soft-news areas of lifestyle and entertainment journalism. In focussing on one particular area of lifestyle journalism – the reporting of travel stories – this paper argues for renewed scholarly efforts in this increasingly important field. Travel journalism’s location at the intersection between information and entertainment, journalism and advertising, as well as its increasingly significant role in the representation of foreign cultures makes it a significant site for scholarly research. By reviewing existing research about travel journalism and examining in detail the special exigencies that constrain it, the article proposes a number of dimensions for future research into the production practices of travel journalism. These dimensions include travel journalism’s role in mediating foreign cultures, its market orientation, motivational aspects and its ethical standards.

Given and News : Media discourse and the construction of community on national days

National anniversaries such as independence days demand precise coordination in order to make citizens change their routines to forego work and spend the day at rest or at festivities that provide social focus and spectacle. The complex social construction of national days is taken for granted and operates as a given in the news media, which are the main agents responsible for coordinating these planned disruptions of normal routines. This study examines the language used in the news to construct the rather unnatural idea of national days and to align people in observing them. The data for the study consist of news stories about the Fourth of July in the New York Times, sampled over 150 years and are supplemented by material from other sources and other countries. The study is multidimensional, applying concepts from pragmatics (speech acts, politeness, information structure), systemic functional linguistics (the interpersonal metafunction and the Appraisal framework) and cognitive linguistics (frames, metaphor) as well as journalism and communications to arrive at an interdisciplinary understanding of how resources for meaning are used by writers and readers of the news stories. The analysis shows that on national anniversaries, nations tend to be metaphorized as persons having birthdays, to whom politeness should be shown. The face of the nation is to be respected in the sense of identifying the nation's interests as one's own (positive face) and speaking of citizen responsibilities rather than rights (negative face). Resources are available for both positive and negative evaluations of events and participants and the newspaper deftly changes footings (Goffman 1981) to demonstrate the required politeness while also heteroglossically allowing for a certain amount of disattention and even protest - within limits, for state holidays are almost never construed as Bakhtinian festivals, as they tend to reaffirm the hierarchy rather than invert it. Celebrations are evaluated mainly for impressiveness, and for the essentially contested quality of appropriateness, which covers norms of predictability, size, audience response, aesthetics, and explicit reference to the past. Events may also be negatively evaluated as dull ("banal") or inauthentic ("hoopla"). Audiences are evaluated chiefly in terms of their enthusiasm, or production of appropriate displays for emotional response, for national days are supposed to be occasions of flooding-out of nationalistic feeling. By making these evaluations, the newspaper reinforces its powerful position as an independent critic, while at the same time playing an active role in the construction and reproduction of emotional order embodied in "the nation's birthday." As an occasion for mobilization and demonstrations of power, national days may be seen to stand to war in the relation of play to fighting (Bateson 1955). Evidence from the newspaper's coverage of recent conflicts is adduced to support this analysis. In the course of the investigation, methods are developed for analyzing large collections of newspaper content, particularly topical soft news and feature materials that have hitherto been considered less influential and worthy of study than so-called hard news. In his work on evaluation in newspaper stories, White (1998) proposed that the classic hard news story is focused on an event that threatens the social order, but news of holidays and celebrations in general does not fit this pattern, in fact its central event is a reproduction of the social order. Thus in the system of news values (Galtung and Ruge 1965), national holiday news draws on "ground" news values such as continuity and predictability rather than "figure" news values such as negativity and surprise. It is argued that this ground helps form a necessary space for hard news to be seen as important, similar to the way in which the information structure of language is seen to rely on the regular alternation of given and new information (Chafe 1994).

Broadening the focus : the case for lifestyle journalism as a field of scholarly inquiry

This introduction to the special issue outlines the case for an increased focus on studying lifestyle journalism, an area of journalism which, despite its rapid rise over recent decades, has not received much attention from scholars in journalism studies. Criticised for being antithetical to public interest and watchdog notions of journalism, lifestyle journalism is still ridiculed by some as being unworthy of being associated with the term journalism. However, in outlining the field's development and a critique of definitions of journalism, this paper argues that there are a number of good reasons for broadening the focus. In fact, lifestyle journalism?here defined 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?has much to offer for scholarly inquiry and is of increasing relevance for society.

A profile of Australian travel journalists' professional views and ethical standards

Despite significant changes in mainstream journalism in recent decades, journalistic fields beyond the news have been little explored. In an attempt to contribute to a deeper understanding of such fields, this article examines the role perceptions of 85 Australian travel journalists. By viewing travel journalism as a distinct field of practice that is affected by a unique mix of influences, this study identifies five dimensions of practitioners’ role perceptions. These relate to travel journalists’ views of themselves as Cultural Mediators, Critics, Entertainers, Information Providers and Travellers. In addition, the study examines in some depth the ethical standards of travel journalists. Determinants of these views and standards are explored. The study argues that, in light of travel journalists’ increasingly important role in reporting about foreign places, more remains to be done to promote travel stories that show a deeper understanding of other cultures and which contain a more critical appraisal of destinations.

Mediating orientation and self-expression in the world of consumption : Australian and German lifestyle journalists' professional views

Despite having experienced rapid popularity over the past two decades, lifestyle journalism is still somewhat neglected by academic researchers. So far mostly explored as either part of wider lifestyle programming, particularly on television, or in terms of individual sub-fields, such as travel, fashion or food journalism, lifestyle journalism is in need of scholarly analysis particularly in the area of production, based on the increasing importance which the field has in influencing audiences’ ways of life. This study explores the professional views of 89 Australian and German lifestyle journalists through in-depth interviews in order to explore the ways in which they engage in processes of influencing audiences’ self-expression, identities and consumption behaviors. The article argues that through its work, lifestyle journalism is a significant shaper of identities in today’s consumer societies.

Metaphors of identity in dating ads and newspaper articles

This article investigates metaphors of identity in dating ads and in two types of newspaper writing, 'hard' and 'soft' news articles. It focuses on issues of textualization and processing, and particularly on the role of cotext in decoding metaphors. Taking a pragmatic approach founded in the cooperative principle, it argues that the maxims of quality and relation play related but separable roles in the interpretation of identity metaphors; and that this process is guided and constrained by cotextual selections in the environment of the metaphorical term. The particular kinds of cotextual guidance provided by the writer are seen to vary according to genre-driven issues. These include the purpose and stylistic conventions of the genre in which the metaphor occurs and the circumstances under which the text is composed and read. Differing functional motivations are suggested for the use of identity metaphors in each of the genres considered. © Walter de Gruyter 2007.

Investigative journalism in Mexico: between ideals and realities. The case of Morelia

The aim of this paper is to analyse the state of the investigative journalism in Mexico, especially the one that is practiced at the local level in the provinces. That is, this research is based upon a case study conducted in Morelia, the capital city of the state of Michoacán. The empirical evidence will show that there is an evident divergence regarding the practice of the investigative journalism: on the one hand, journalists are aware of what this concept involves and they consider that they practice it on a regular basis; but, on the other, the content analysis prove otherwise. In other words, the account of what is actually printed significantly differs from the news workers’ perceptions, because the former shows a poorly developed journalistic investigation practice.

La política exterior turca en el marco del Complejo de Seguridad Regional de Medio Oriente. Del soft power al smart power. (2002 - 2013)

Dada la confluencia de Turquía en Asia, Medio Oriente, los Balcanes y Europa, el gobierno está en la necesidad de responder a los desafíos de ser un Estado pivote. Es en este punto donde su política exterior se convierte en la mayor herramienta para sobresalir y sobrevivir en un ambiente heterogéneo. El objetivo de esta monografía de grado es analizar la política exterior turca en el marco del Complejo de Seguridad Regional de Medio Oriente a partir de los aportes de la Escuela de Copenhague y su Teoría de los Complejos de Seguridad Regional, para comprender sus estrategias de soft y hard power en su política exterior a fin de analizar si se consolidó un smart power que permita posicionar a Turquía en una potencia regional.

Co3(SO4)3(OH)2[enH2]: a newS= 3/2 Kagome-type layered sulfate with a unique connectivity

The Kagome lattice, comprising a two-dimensional array of corner-sharing equilateral triangles, is central to the exploration of magnetic frustration. In such a lattice, antiferromagnetic coupling between ions in triangular plaquettes prevents all of the exchange interactions being simultaneously satisfied and a variety of novel magnetic ground states may result at low temperature. Experimental realization of a Kagome lattice remains difficult. The jarosite family of materials of nominal composition AM3(SO4)2(OH)6 (A = monovalent cation; M= Fe3+, Cr3+), offers perhaps one of the most promising manifestations of the phenomenon of magnetic frustration in two dimensions. The magnetic properties of jarosites are however extremely sensitive to the degree of coverage of magnetic sites. Consequently, there is considerable interest in the use of soft chemical techniques for the design and synthesis of novel materials in which to explore the effects of spin, degree of site coverage and connectivity on magnetic frustration.

Africa through Chinese eyes: new frames or the same old lens? African news in English from China Central Television, compared with the BBC

[No abstract as this is a book chapter: the following represents the first 2 paragraphs.] The screen fills with close-ups of smiling African faces against a black-and-orange background: the carefree child, the gap-toothed man with smoke curling from his pipe. The faces retreat into an outline of a map of Africa as the saccharine background music dissolves into birdsong. The silhouette of an acacia tree appears. This is not the much-derided Western romantic stereotype of the continent: it is an extract from a promotional trailer on CCTV Africa, the embodiment of China’s “soft power” drive and a spearhead of Chinese state television’s overseas expansion. Yet this image is at variance with the English-language channel’s professed ambitions. The Chinese premier, Li Keqiang, himself declared that “CCTV embraces the vision of seeing Africa from an African perspective and reporting Africa from the viewpoint of Africa”. These contradictory messages prompt fundamental questions about CCTV’s expansion into Africa. Are the channel’s English-language news bulletins aimed at African or Chinese viewers? What kind of Africa – and indeed China – do they represent, and could the framing of African events by CCTV News provide an alternative to the perspective of international rivals? Is CCTV’s main mission in Africa to provide news or to act as mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party and state? This chapter addresses these questions by applying a cross-cultural variant of framing theory to the news content of CCTV’s Africa Live and that of its closest direct competitor, Focus on Africa from BBC World News TV.

Las limitaciones de la implementación del soft power en la política exterior China hacia Chile (2002-2012)

Este estudio de caso tiene como objetivo principal analizar la manera en la que las limitaciones de la implementación del soft power de la política exterior China hacia Chile han condicionado las relaciones sino-chilenas al aspecto económico en detrimento del aspecto político y cultural bajo el gobierno de Hu Jintao (2002-2012). Este análisis se elabora a partir de la conceptualización hecha por Joseph Nye en torno al soft power; al cual, se le han otorgado características adicionales dadas por teóricos chinos, como la introducción y, fortalecimiento de China a través de la diplomacia pública para la proyección de su imagen internacional, basada en la cooperación y beneficio mutuo, con el fin de lograr el desarrollo pacífico en el siglo XXI.