Changing Roles, Boundaries, and Commerciality: Exploring the Production of Lifestyle Journalism in Singapore

Abstract

Partly because of a longstanding privileging of journalism's political function, lifestyle journalism has been a comparatively understudied area of journalism in the broader journalism literature, despite its popularity with news audiences worldwide. This thesis importantly contributes to growing lifestyle journalism scholarship by examining the production of lifestyle journalism in Singapore, a modern city-state in Southeast Asia. Following calls to de-Westernise journalism scholarship, Singapore is used here as a case study to explore how lifestyle journalism is shaped by an Asian country’s specific political, economic, social, and cultural circumstances. Through in-depth interviews with 31 Singaporean lifestyle journalists across newspapers, magazines, digital publications, and freelancers, this thesis explored the timely issues of how lifestyle journalists: a) position their profession noting that conceptualisations of journalism are largely based on political journalism; b) conceive of their role orientations and performance; c) perceive and handle new media actors in the lifestyle journalism field such as social media influencers; and d) deal with commercial influences in their work and the associated ethical concerns. The findings suggest that the lifestyle journalists a) subscribe to a political–lifestyle hierarchy where they saw their profession as distinct from journalism, yet were still inclined to measure their work against normative journalism standards; b) embody a complex journalistic role conception-performance gap where there are inconsistencies between their role orientations (want to do and should do) and narrated role performance (say they do); c) enact a variety of strategies in trying to protect the boundaries of their profession from the incursions of new media actors such as social media influencers; and d) oscillate between resistance and resignation against commercial pressures, leading to severe compromises of their ethics.