“Wherever I go, there you are” the mobility/mooring paradigm in travel journalism

• Main Author: Duffy, Andrew
• Other Authors: Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: 2019
• Subjects: Journalism; DRNTU::Social sciences::Journalism; Mobility/Mooring
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/106066; http://hdl.handle.net/10220/47911; http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1461670X.2016.1238317
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

An article reveals a journalist’s agenda as well as their preconceptions about the audience. Based on schema theory, the mobility/mooring paradigm demonstrates how travel journalists create interplay between the challenge of the unknown and the reassurance of the known. First, this interplay reveals how a journalist forms their identity and imagines an audience, and makes assumptions about their world-view. Content analysis of newspaper travel journalism finds that mobility of travel and ideas is expressed as novelty, exotica and adventure; and that these are moored in presumed audience schemata of social identification, cultural similarity, and a shared awareness of tourist behaviour. Second, the interplay between mobility and mooring reveals presumed, accepted and established structures of power, representing a host country via the cultural frameworks of the writer’s nation.