ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces an ideology specific to travel journalism, looking how it differs from ‘hard news’ journalism as proposed by Deuze (2005). Travel journalism, as a subsection of lifestyle journalism, requires its own particular definition to help understand how travel journalists function, what values they embody, and how they might define their professional identities. Through interviews with journalists, it becomes possible to suggest notions of exclusivity, public service, and objectivity together with ideas of contextualizing, consumer service, and transparency as a way to begin challenging one singular ideology across genres. Furthermore, the chapter examines how digital culture and new media are influencing the evolution of travel journalists’ work, leading to more of a freelance culture where practitioners need to rethink their gatekeeping role and multitask to respond to growing demands from editors and audiences. These suggestions for a more complex and tailored professional ideology and identity serve to further existing academic research on travel journalists and will help us to understand what might distinguish them from the normative journalism usually discussed in media research. This ideology will further assist in creating a definition of a travel journalist that helps set these practitioners apart from non-professional contributors such as bloggers.
