When Journalists are Voiceless: How Lifestyle Journalists Cover Hate and Mitigate Harassment

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

“…While it is assumed that lifestyle journalism is more strongly market-oriented than hard news, very little evidence supports this assumption (Hanusch et al 2017), and, more saliently, lifestyle news arguably does offer essential value to public service journalism in information valuable to civic life (Hanusch 2019;Perreault and Miller 2022).…”

“…Working class people asked media outlets more serious questions about rape, HIV and mental health (Banjac and Hanusch 2022). Hence, lifestyle journalists find themselves addressing a range of guidance-related needs-at times serving as a sort of 'buyer's guide' to help people determine their financial purchases (Perreault and Vos, 2020 163), while at other times, lifestyle journalists have helped audiences manage harassment and hostile environments (Perreault and Miller 2022;Whipple 2023).…”

“…In journalism studies scholarship, lifestyle journalism-such as fashion journalism-has often been overlooked in favor of the more serious, and perceived important specialties of hard news such as crime and politics (Hanusch, 2012). Lifestyle journalism specialties, such as travel, fashion, gaming, sport-certainly have difficulty attaching themselves to many of the normative democratic values of journalism: seen particularly in journalism's emphasis on detachment from commercial interests (From and Kristensen 2019;Perreault and Vos 2020), yet it is nevertheless true that lifestyle journalism manages quite serious aspects in the lives of the audience (Perreault and Miller 2022;Whipple 2023). Prior lifestyle journalism scholarship has reflected that the diminished status of lifestyle journalism has been linked, in particular, to its "market-driven" emphasis (Hanusch 2012, 2).…”

Unprepared for Reality: Early-Career Journalists Ill-Equipped for Hostility in the Field

“…Because of its many forms and the multiple channels through which it can reach journalists, hostility can be hard to escape (Ivask & Lon, 2023). And although hostility has long been understood as a problem faced by political journalists and those reporting on polarizing topics (Posetti et al, 2021), and for women journalists (Chen et al, 2020) covering "masculine" subjects such as sports (Everbach, 2018), journalists have also experienced hostility while reporting on lifestyle and feature topics (Perreault & Miller, 2022) and while doing vox pop interviews, even at light-hearted community gatherings (Mesmer, 2022a). Many journalists have normalized hostility as just another part of the job, especially in the case of online hostility (Deavours et al, 2022), some even consider the hate they receive in response to stories as a "badge of honor" and sign of a job well done (Miller, 2022), therefore ignoring the serious consequences that can stem from hostility.…”

Discursive (re)construction of a journalistic source: A case study of paradigm repair in reporting on the Southern Poverty Law Center

“…The SPLC provides useful context for journalists who fear falling into what Craft and Davis (2015) term the "objectivity trap," in which voices on one side of an issue threaten to label journalists as biased as a means to extort falsely "balanced" or "objective" coverage between two competing ideas that are not equally valid (p. 216; see also Perreault, 2022). This is a form of coverage that obviously puts journalists in physically precarious situations, wherein journalists may even feel pressured to self-censor (Perreault, 2014;Perreault & Meltzer, 2022;Perreault & Miller, 2022). So for example, journalists covering a hate group rally will feel pressured to quote the white nationalist group if they quote the counter-protestors .…”