ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the representation of Canadian Arctic tourism in three distinct forms of contemporary travel journalism. The study is attentive to the role that climate change and time play in such coverage. After introducing the concepts of “Last Chance Tourism” and “disaster capitalism,” they are related to the practices of Arctic travel journalists. Next, qualitative analysis of a sample of relevant journalistic texts places commercial travel journalism into dialogue with reporting by local journalists and arrives at two main findings. First, that climate change was underrepresented across the sample. Second, that two distinct conceptions of time—aligned with unique settings and contexts for journalistic production—characterized the examined coverage. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of how these findings point both to the shortcomings of Canadian Arctic travel journalism, and to the potential for its reform through the adoption of a systems journalism approach (Callison and Young, 2020).
