JOUR 642/01 (Winter 2025): SPEC TOP/ JOUR STUDIES - LIFESTYLE JOURNALISM
Lifestyle journalism—which includes topics such as food and drink, travel, fashion, fitness, health and wellness, leisure, home improvement and décor—first started gaining popularity in the post-World War Two newspaper ‘Women’s Pages.’ The field has since outgrown its traditionally gendered place in newspapers and is now just about everywhere, with news media outlets investing more resources into lifestyle content to attract both offline and online audiences and advertisers. At the same time, new players have entered the field, with lifestyle journalists and social media lifestyle influencers competing for attention in overcrowded digital multimedia spaces.
Scholars who study lifestyle journalism’s forms and functions generally agree it is a “distinct journalistic field” (Hanusch, 2012) that focuses on providing its audiences ‘news you can use,’ or useful and entertaining information and guidance regarding consumer issues and cultural trends that impact people’s everyday lives.
This course proposes a critical evaluation of lifestyle journalism to provide a deeper understanding of its history, how it has changed, and its possible future(s) as a potentially disruptive form of journalistic storytelling that encourages public discussion and reflection about important social, historical, cultural, economic, and political issues.
By interrogating specific scholarly texts and analyzing works of lifestyle journalism from across specialties, we will explore the evolution of lifestyle journalism, the field’s close ties to advertising, public relations, and consumer culture, the boundaries drawn between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ news and lifestyle journalists’ related role conceptions, and lifestyle journalism’s expanding borders and audiences.
Through lifestyle journalism content production workshops and assignments, this course also seeks to help students hone their research and reporting skills through the exploration of various lifestyle topics. The course aims to provide students a supportive space in which they will be encouraged to build confidence in generating original story ideas, explore creative journalistic storytelling methods, and develop their own personal writing styles and voices.
Thus, the course’s main objectives are to:
(1) provide students with a deeper understanding of the theoretical and practical underpinnings of lifestyle journalism;
(2) develop students’ critical thinking, news literary, and analysis skills through exploring works of lifestyle journalism;
(3) help students hone and apply their research, reporting, and digital multimedia storytelling skills to lifestyle journalism content production.
- Teacher: ELYSE AMEND