No More Market-Driven Than Hard News: Lifestyle Journalists’ Market Drive and Perceived Audience Obligations

Abstract

Throughout journalism studies scholarship, the market orientation of lifestyle journalism has been associated with its diminished place within the journalistic field. Specifically, because lifestyle journalists are often thought to entertain and not inform, they hold less social capital within the journalism industry. This study aims to explore how lifestyle journalists perceive their own market orientation and their role relative to the audience. Through the lens of market theory for news production, this study reports on semi-structured interviews with U.S.-based lifestyle journalists (n=30) and argues that lifestyle journalists perceive that they do feel effects of market influence, but no more than those experienced in hard news specialties. However, lifestyle journalists did perceive expectations in their newsroom that their work ought to be market driven, and bring in revenue, in order to support the reporting of hard news.