News values go on holiday: the ideological values of travel journalism

The ‘newsworthiness’ of news continues to be an issue of great importance within the field of journalism studies – as the recent publication of Harcup and O’Neill’s article ‘What is news? News values revisited (again)’ (Journalism Studies, 2016) attests. However, the question of what makes the news the news has been pursued, almost exclusively, in the context of mainstream news events and political reporting. The values that underpin other forms of journalism have as yet received little academic attention. This paper seeks to explore the ‘news values’ of British travel journalism. As a form of lifestyle journalism, travel features arguably lack the political relevance and importance of their ‘hard’ news counter-parts. Nonetheless, given its close alliance to the world’s largest industry (tourism), this paper argues that the underlying ideological values of travel journalism are significant and worthy of study for what they reveal of the representational and narrative features of the genre as well as the cultural and economic context in which it is produced. As an exploratory investigation the aim is to identify and compile a preliminary taxonomy of ‘news values’ specific to the genre of travel journalism.