Trends in Cultural Journalism

Abstract

Various studies report that cultural journalism increasingly focuses on service and entertainment instead of serious arts coverage. The press prioritizes popular culture over traditional high arts to a growing extent. However, this shift in journalistic attention does not necessarily signify a straightforward decline in aesthetic standards, as popular cultural forms like film have developed along the lines of high art principles in the past decades. This article charts trends in American, Dutch, French, and German film journalism between 1955 and 2005. It demonstrates that coverage is typified by a serious aesthetic approach from the 1970s onwards. The principles of art are seen to steer journalists' attention to an important degree: the review remains the predominant journalistic genre, and newspapers devote more attention to films by prestigious directors than strictly commercial moviemakers. As such, film's prominence in the press does not seem to indicate a decline in serious cultural journalism but rather a revaluation of a popular cultural form.

The Tensions of the Cultural News Beat

“…On the other hand, the expansion of popular culture at the expense of fine arts in mainstream media has been argued to simply reflect changes in middle brow cultural taste hierarchies and changes in culture itself (Larsen 2008;Kristensen 2010). Similarly, countering the crisis narrative, Kersten and Janssen (2017) show that the increasing coverage of film since the mid-1950s in Western newspapers has involved an aesthetically serious approach, especially since the 1970s, revaluing film as an art form, and suggesting that the cultural coverage of film has not deteriorated or become more commercially oriented. However, these aspects of the cultural attention span are sources of continuous tensions in cultural journalism practice and scholarly debates.…”

Definições e Tendências do Jornalismo de Cinema em Portugal

“…Esta tendência vai ao encontro daquilo que já havia sido identificado por Kersten & Janssen (2016), em que o realizador é o principal protagonista nas peças jornalísticas dedicadas ao cinema na imprensa de referêcia europeia e norte-americana.…”

Cultural journalism—Journalism about culture

“…The fact that "cultural journalism" has become a more commonly used international scholarly term since the mid-2010s (e.g., da Silva & Silva, 2014;Heikkilä et al, 2017;Hovden & Knapskog, 2015;Jaakkola, 2015;Kersten & Janssen, 2017;Kristensen & From, 2015a;Kristensen & Riegert, 2017) denotes a middle-ground perspective between the very inclusive and more narrowly delineated terms and the emerging institutionalisation of cultural journalism as a distinct sub-discipline in journalism studies. This is confirmed by the fact that even though cultural journalism may not (yet) have its own journals or conference divisions, it is offered as an academic subject at many universities.…”