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

Abstract

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.