Citizen tourist: newspaper travel journalism's responsibility to its audience

Abstract

Travel is the stuff of dreams. But its facilitation or impediment is the reality of commerce and governments and their manipulation by marketing and political considerations. This thesis examines how travel journalism can maintain responsibility to a 'private' tourist audience in the 'public' tourism sphere.

Travel journalism is not only an under-researched area, but provides an important site to study the role of public interest information for a consumer audience participating in a sometimes culturally and politically dangerous activity. The reporting of travel by mainstream newspapers concentrates on the travel dream, while the tourism industry, described as the largest in the world, receives little scrutiny by society's guardians of democracy.

This thesis examines literature from the fields of journalism, sociology and marketing to highlight the private tourist audience desires and the measures that commercial and government travel enterprises employ to reach consumers through public relations influence over journalism entities and practitioners. This study also emphasises the public nature of tourism and the risks it presents to tourists to examine how travel journalism, as a responsible moral practice, should address its audience.

A content analysis was conducted on a sample of Australian newspaper travel journalism to provide a description of international travel coverage. More specifically it revealed the characteristics of travel articles that provide public interest information to move the private tourist audience to engage in the public tourism sphere as an active citizenship.