Bringing the World to us: Travel journalism and the mediation of others

In the world of lifestyle journalism – a genre that stretches across an ever-broadening range of subjects from the arts and DIY to sex and science – travel journalism is one of the most long-established forms of non-news journalism. As a highly commercial form of journalism, one subject to the changing winds of globalisation, travel journalism trades in the representation of destinations, cultural mores and practices. Travel journalism matters because it tells us something about our cultural understanding of different parts of the world. In understanding travel journalism as a site where the representations of ‘home’ and ‘other’ are constantly contested and refigured, this chapter seeks to examine how this dynamic is further complicated by the broad range of travel content we now encounter across multiple media platforms from print journalism to TikTok. It considers the extent to which these different media platforms, built as they are on very different economic models, facilitate different forms of cultural mediation. This chapter finds that whilst stereotypical cultural discourse and the exoticization of ‘others’ still proliferate, the breadth of travel content across multiple platforms has impacted on the mediation of cultural difference in some surprising and unexpected ways.