School of Social Science

Travel journalism about natural attractions is environmental communication at the cusp of consumerism and concern. Countries and regions that market forests, rivers and wildlife to international tourists drive place-of-origin brand recognition that benefits exporters in other sectors. Place-branding in such destinations is not just PR for environmentally sustainable development and consumption, but also a political enterprise. Environmental Communication and Travel Journalism considers tourism public relations as elite reputation management, and applies models of political conflict and source-media relations to the analysis of the 'soft' genre of travel journalism. The book seeks to understand how, in whose interests and against what odds discourses of cosmopolitanism and place-branding influence the way travel journalists represent vulnerable and contested environments. Informed by interviews with journalists and their sources, Environmental Communication and Travel Journalism identifies and theorises networks, cultures, discursive strategies and multiple loyalties that can assist or interrupt flows of environmental concern in the cosmopolitan public sphere. The book should be of interest to scholars of environmental communication, environmental politics, journalism, tourism, marketing and public relations.

McGaurr, Lyn 2016, ‘The Photography of Debate and Desire: Image, Environment and the Public Sphere’, Ethical Space, special issue ‘Beyond clickbait and commerce: The ethics, possibilities and challenges of not-for-profit media’, vol. 13, no. 2/3, pp. 16-34.

Photography has long been a powerful tool of environmental communication and debate. In their efforts to promote environmental issues, landscape and wildlife photographers committed to conservation may provide images to established environmental non-government organisations (ENGOs), appear in activist documentaries, found their own ENGOs, curate websites and social media pages, run galleries or publish books. Yet the same photographs and photography events that feature in activist media may also appear in the editorial sections of commercial newspapers and magazines, and in public relations and advertising for consumer goods.
This paper draws on interviews with photographers and ENGO spokespeople in North America to consider the implications for the public sphere of image events that combine activist media and mainstream media to promote environmental concern.
Key words: image event, public screen, public sphere, environmental movements, Great Bear Rainforest

It is no secret that the frames of travel journalism tend to be anchored in the world views of its writers and readers. Yet if we expand our interest in cosmopolitanism beyond the mediation of cultural diversity to the media's engagement with politics and the environment, we may find it a site with more to offer the public sphere than banal cosmopolitanism. The very home-market focus responsible for some of travel journalism's limitations can enhance its ability to foster an appreciation of distant and home cultures as united in their common humanity and shared vulnerability to environmental threats. Viewed from this perspective, travel journalism appears favourably positioned to perform the cosmopolitan function ascribed to the media by Ulrich Beck of recognising and reflecting " a sense of partaking in the great human experiment in civilization – with one's own language and cultural symbols and the means to counter global threats – and hence of making a contribution to world culture " (Beck 2006:21). Drawing on texts by, and interviews with, British and US authors of travel journalism about Australia's island state of Tasmania, this chapter considers the genre's mediation of environmental threats. The chapter finds that travel journalism can accommodate expressions of what I describe as brand-sensitive cosmopolitan concern – concern for distant destinations it simultaneously praises as places worth visiting. This is because such concern can service particular industry needs while simultaneously functioning as evidence of marketable editorial independence. In the case of endangered animals, for example, expressions of concern for species that tourists can still view in their natural habitat but may soon be extinct in the wild are also a promise of bragging rights – one of tourism's most desirable rewards. In the case of environmental degradation, political comment can be justified as encouraging better stewardship of places of tourism value or arousing the interest of readers facing similar problems at home. Either way, the travel journalist's concern for the landscape marks it as special enough to warrant inclusion in the reader's itinerary. In this manner, brand-sensitive cosmopolitan concern may form a bridge between consumer and political cosmopolitanism. Yet the very travel journalism that supports Beck's faith in the media's ability to play a central role in the public contestation of environmental risks also provides evidence that media framing of one environmental problem can disguise the risks of another. Tasmania's capital, Hobart, is one of the farthest destinations from London and Washington – some 17,000 kilometres from each. The tourism sector is responsible for approximately 5 per cent of global carbon dioxide, and tourism transport accounts for around three-quarters of the sector's emissions. Despite the potential of brand-sensitive cosmopolitan concern to contribute to the emergence of the cosmopolitan outlook, which Beck defines by its public reflexivity, its advocacy of travel to distant places can deflect attention from debate about the global environmental costs of pursuing economic sustainability through tourism development. Transnational travel journalism that expresses brand-sensitive cosmopolitan concern often has a political purpose and can unsettle those responsible for environmental problems in host destinations. Yet it does not necessarily indicate a weakening of the structural bonds between mainstream travel journalism and the broader tourism industry. And herein lies a cosmopolitan paradox at the heart of this perplexing genre, for travel journalism that takes on carbon-intensive tourism head-on by advocating travel closer to home negates its own ability to expose tourists to distant cultures and alert them to distant environmental threats.

This chapter examines the intersection of activism and travel journalism, which is an underexplored area in the existing literature. My theoretical starting point is Lovink's concept of tactical media, as elaborated and adjusted by Lester and Hutchins, who see value in exploring the broader strategic and tactical uses of new media in environmental conflict and, " contra-Lovink " , regard many environmental NGOs as " worthwhile, albeit imperfect organizations " (2009: 582). Although focusing primarily on the actions of travel journalists themselves, each of the two examples I present in the case study begins with the deployment of a new-media tactic by environmental activists. In the first example, the original web protest emerges in a form that readily corresponds with Lovink's description of tactical media as anonymous outsider do-it-yourself new-media activism. In the second, the initial online campaign seeks legitimacy by publicising the involvement of large, well-established NGOs, thereby making a virtue of the very " professionalism inside the office culture of these networked organizations " with which Lovink takes issue (2002: 260). By tracing the outcomes of these examples of new-media environmental activism as manifested in, or absent from, the traditional or new-media practice or texts of two travel journalists, I attempt to determine whether either represents a sustained challenge to " the many influences, pressures and constraints that encourage the media to gravitate towards the central orbit of power " (Curran, 2002: 148). In so doing, I ask more broadly whether new media can enhance the agency of travel journalists and, through them, the power of environmental groups, in the face of structural forces that favour elite sources.

Environmental nongovernmental organizations are often challenged to engage in economic debates. One response is to frame contested or protected areas and species as tourism assets. In this exploratory comparative study, we examine the discourse of environmentalists and members of the tourism sector in Australia and Canada for evidence they frame tourism as a social license to protect. We find environmentalists and sympathetic ecotourism operators frame successful activism in scenic places with a history of intense environmental conflict as an investment in tourism and the local economy. This makes a case for protection from extractive industries, but falters when the adversary is tourism itself.

Although travel journalism can have considerable influence in one of the world’s largest marketplaces, a definition remains elusive and the genre continues to be under-explored. The explanation may be a scholarly ambivalence towards the use of the word ‘‘journalism’’ to describe texts characterized by subjectivity and a conspicuous proximity to tourism advertising. Yet not all travel journalism is tourism’s handmaiden. Drawing on examples of US and British newspaper and magazine travel articles that criticize forestry practices in Australia’s island state of Tasmania, this paper attempts to understand better the genesis and deployment of political comment in a genre routinely subsidized and besieged by government public relations. The paper argues that travel journalism that subverts traditional expectations of the genre through its mediation of environmental conflict can usefully be understood as a textual manifestation of the cosmopolitan interplay of culture and environment arising out of transnational and cross-genre discourse. Noting Ulrich Beck’s faith in the media to promote active political cosmopolitanism, the paper hypothesizes that further analysis of travel journalism has the potential to provide surprising insights into journalism, public relations and the mediation of global concern.

As journalism scholars’ interest in the impact of public relations on hard news has grown in recent years, little attention has been paid to attempts by elite sources to influence soft journalism. In an effort to better understand what can, in fact, be complex interactions between travel journalists and public relations practitioners, this paper tracks one destination’s brand over an extended period of cosmopolitan concern. It finds that in times of conflict, government tourism public relations may become politically instrumental, as public relations practitioners seek simultaneously to promote the destination and shield it from media scrutiny. At such times, travel journalists may subvert traditional expectations of their genre by exposing contradictions in the brand. The paper concludes that the power of travel journalism derives not only from its authors’ capacity to communicate through their texts but also from their tendency to be enmeshed in the
interactivity of the brand.