Making Tabloid Travel Journalism: Values and Visuality

Abstract

The processes by which news is selected—the values that determine the selection of one story over another—have long attracted scholarly interest. In the broader context of exploring journalism’s ‘fourth estate’ function and its claim to hold power to account academics have sought to understand the ideological and financial influences that shape news content. These lines of enquiry have tended to focus almost exclusively on the ‘hard’ news of political reporting, with little consideration being given to the underlying ‘news’ values of other forms of journalism. Whilst other forms of journalism might not be judged and ascribed values based on its political significance in the way that ‘hard’ news is, it is nonetheless the case that other forms of journalism cannot be valueless. This chapter seeks to explore the ‘news’ values of travel journalism produced in British tabloid newspapers. It examines the points of divergence and different in the values that underpin tabloid and broadsheet forms of travel journalism. It considers whether tabloid based travel journalism appears to be constituted by specifically ‘tabloid’ values. In so doing it finds that in some forms of tabloid based travel content use visual images as primary drivers of narrative in ways that are very much in keeping with the fast developing interface between the stylistics of tabloidization and technological possibilities of social media inspired and derived content. Identifying and examining the news values of tabloid travel journalism facilitates further understanding of the cultural influence of this form of journalism as well as its economic power and associations.