The Impact of Climate Change on Lifestyle Journalism

ABSTRACT

How do journalists conceive of covering climate change from a lifestyle perspective? Do they think reporting on climate and lifestyle should provide their audiences with advice and solutions for how to make climate friendly choices? We address these questions through a survey among Norwegian journalists and editors with questions about their experience with reporting on climate and lifestyles, their evaluation of the importance of journalism on climate and lifestyle, and what role they see for constructive journalism in the coverage of climate and lifestyle issues. We provide evidence that issues of climate change and lifestyles to some extent are covered by journalists within a range of journalistic beats reflecting that climate change affects lifestyle choices in complex ways. A central idea in our argument is that there is a close conceptual connection between lifestyle journalism and constructive journalism, and we show that there is a systematic relationship between evaluations of the importance of lifestyle journalism and of the role constructive journalism should have in the coverage of climate and lifestyles. We also chart the nature and extent of the disagreement around the role of constructive journalism in the coverage of this issue.

KEYWORDS:

• Lifestyle journalism
• climate change
• climate change journalism
• constructive journalism
• journalistic values
• service journalism
• climate-friendly lifestyle

Introduction

As arguably the most severe global crisis of our time, deeply affecting all aspects of our societies, climate change raises fundamental questions and constitutes a “test of capacity” for journalism (Kunelius 2019). Much of the journalistic reporting on climate change today engages with this challenge and is driven by the ambition to produce journalism that helps move the world in a more sustainable direction. Examples of this trend are initiatives such as Covering Climate Now, a network of 400 news outlets with the slogan “Journalism should reflect what the science says: the climate emergency is here.”¹ And The Guardian, one of the news organizations that started this network, now consistently uses the term “climate crisis” instead of “climate change”, as does the major Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten. The Norwegian public broadcaster NRK has recently issued a strategy of non-neutrality for their coverage of climate change issues.² Approaches like these have emerged gradually over the last 15 years and have been aptly characterized as “transformative” (Brüggemann, Frech, and Schäfer 2022) because (1) this is a journalism with the ambition to contribute to the transformation of society in a more sustainable direction and (2) when striving to realize this ambition the professional norms and practices of climate journalism are themselves transformed. On this latter point, Brüggemann, Frech, and Schäfer (2022) see a tendency towards more solutions oriented—constructive—journalism, i.e., journalism that not only covers the problems caused by climate-related events but also focusses on possible solutions to the problems and covers more actively how different actors can contribute to these solutions (Bro 2019; Haagerup 2017; Hermans and Drok 2018; Krüger et al. 2022; Mast, Coesemans, and Temmerman 2019; McIntyre and Gyldensted 2018; Meier 2018).

Another development in the journalism on climate change is that, since climate change affects all aspects of society and nature, climate change has become a relevant issue across all journalistic beats, from reporting on the science of climate change to coverage of roles of consumption patterns and lifestyles (Alvarez 2019; Brüggemann, Frech, and Schäfer 2022; Donald 2019; Nisbet and Fahy 2015). However, the potentially important roles of journalism in connecting the issue of climate change with people’s everyday lives have not received much attention in journalism studies. In this study, we therefore investigate how Norwegian journalists and editors conceive of the roles of lifestyle journalism in the coverage of climate change and whether they see journalism in this area as transformative in the senses suggested by Brüggemann, Frech, and Schäfer (2022).

Studying journalism on lifestyles and climate change is important, we argue, because people experience the consequences of climate change more and more in their everyday lives, and because making everyday choices of food, transportation, and energy use is not only private choices of consumption but are choices with social and political dimensions. This raise challenges for journalism on climate and lifestyle: While lifestyle journalism has often been considered a form of “soft” news on issues related to the private sphere (Hanitzsch and Vos 2016), journalism on lifestyle and climate change must address audiences not only as consumers but also as citizens (Craig 2016). On this background, it is important to understand what approaches to the coverage of the relationship between lifestyles and climate change the journalists think is appropriate. To what extent do journalists think, for example, that journalism in this area should motivate people to make more climate friendly choices?

In this paper, we investigate how journalists and editors conceive of covering climate change from a lifestyle perspective. We examine this empirically by first looking at what the areas of specialization are of journalists who have written about climate and lifestyles. Second, we ask how important journalists from all fields think it is to cover climate change from a lifestyle perspective, in comparison with reporting on the systemic aspects of climate change. Third, we chart the extent to which journalists think the coverage of climate change and lifestyles should help people solve the problem of living in more climate friendly ways.

Empirically, we present the results from original data collected through an online survey, undertaken in March 2021, with members of the Norwegian Journalists’ Union and members of the Association of Norwegian Editors. This study is innovative in two main ways. First, as there is so far little research on journalism on the relationship between climate and lifestyle, we contribute important new knowledge on journalists’ and editors’ perceptions of the role of journalism in this area. Second, while most other studies are based on data collected only from journalists that specialize in reporting on climate change (e.g., Schäfer and Painter 2021), we contribute knowledge on how journalistic professionals in general view reporting on climate and lifestyle.

Background

The Relationship Between Lifestyles and Climate Change

Our approach to the characterization of journalism on climate and lifestyles takes as a starting point the well-documented fact that climate change already affects our daily lives in many ways and will do so even more in the future. We then suggest conceptualizing journalism on climate and lifestyle as all reporting on how climate change affects lifestyles and how lifestyles affect climate change. Our argument is that since climate change affects peoples’ lives in so many ways the coverage of the relationships between climate change and lifestyles will raise issues relevant to a wide range of journalistic beats.

Figure 1 illustrates the complexity of the relationships between climate change and lifestyles.

Figure 1. The complex of relationships around lifestyles and climate change. The arrows labelled (a) represent relationships between lifestyles and climate. The dotted arrow labelled (b) represents societal factors that influence and help shape individual lifestyle choices. The arrow labelled (c) represents systems-level measures to tackle climate change.

Consider first the bi-directional relationship between “Lifestyles” and “Climate change”, labelled (a) in Figure 1. In one direction, lifestyles cause climate change: our individual lifestyle choices of transportation, diet, and energy use are important parts of the causes of climate change and changes in these consumption patterns have the potential to contribute significantly to the mitigation of climate change (Akenji 2014; Hertwich and Peters 2009; IPCC Sixth Assessment Report 2022; Ivanova et al. 2020; Williamson et al. 2018). In the other direction, climate change can affect our individual lifestyle choices by causing changes to our natural environments, for example through extreme weather events, or temperature changes (IPCC Sixth Assessment Report 2022; World Meteorological Organization 2022). Furthermore, climate change can affect lifestyles by motivating people to reduce their own carbon footprint through lifestyle changes (Akenji and Chen 2016; Bodolfson, McPearson, and Plunkett 2021; Kalmus 2017; Nicholas 2021). The relationships between lifestyles and climate change are further complicated by the fact that the relationships are embedded in political and economic structures (Akenji and Chen 2016; Dryzek, Norgaard, and Schlossberg 2011). Our lifestyle choices are constrained by the social, economic, cultural, and technological infrastructures within which we live our lives, and these structures are created and changed through political processes (Broome 2012; Norhaus 2013; Stern 2007). Hence, many political and economic measures to mitigate climate change (illustrated with the arrow labelled (c), in Figure 1), e.g., through taxes on emissions, will have consequences for people’s lifestyle choices (Brownstein, Kelly, and Madva 2022). In this way, some of the consequences of climate change on lifestyles are mediated by political decisions, economic forces, and cultural factors (illustrated by the dotted arrow labelled (b), in Figure 1).

We thus argue that, given the complex relationships between climate and lifestyles and the many ways that climate change affects our lives, the coverage of climate change and lifestyles will have to involve journalists from different journalistic beats, rather than being constrained to for instance journalists who focus on “green consumption” (Hammond 2018). We see evidence of this trend in guidelines for the coverage of climate change issued by journalist organizations. The Covering Climate Now network has for example issued recommendations for the coverage of climate change across different beats, in relation to health, food and agriculture, housing, politics and government, business and finance, culture, and consumer life (CCNow 2021; 2023). In all these areas, questions related to the impacts of climate change on people’s daily lives are central.

These considerations give rise to our first research question:

RQ1. (a) To what extent do journalists from different journalistic beats cover climate and lifestyle issues? (b) To what extent do journalists with self-reported experience with writing about climate and lifestyle issues, consider their stories to be constructive journalism?

Lifestyle Journalism and Constructive Journalism

Our study draws on research on lifestyle journalism, climate change journalism, and constructive journalism. Research on how lifestyle journalists conceive of their journalistic roles (Hanitzsch and Vos 2016; Hanusch 2019; Hanusch and Hanitzsch 2013) has identified different dimensions in these role conceptions. The first is the lifestyle journalist as a provider of “information, advice, and reviews of new products, services, and trends … catering to a hybrid social identity of a mix of citizen, consumer, and client” (Hanusch 2019, 205). Many lifestyle journalists identify with this role conception, Hanusch (2019) finds. Second, lifestyle journalists also typically see their role as that of a “life coach” by writing stories that can motivate and help people make changes in their lifestyles. The third characteristic dimension, Hanusch (2019) finds, is that of the lifestyle journalist as “community advocate” characterized by an ambition to “create communities of audiences, providing services to audiences” but also report critically on lifestyle choices and the role of the lifestyle industry. The role conception that finds the most support in this study is that of the lifestyle journalist as “inspiring entertainer” that provide content that is fun to consume, entertaining and inspires audiences in their choices of leisurely activities. A common thread though these four role conceptions is the notion that lifestyle journalism should provide their audiences with services that help them manage challenges they meet in their daily lives.

In a similar vein, From and Kristensen (2018; 2019) argue that lifestyle journalism can be seen as a sub-genre under the umbrella of “service journalism” (Eide 2020; Eide and Knight 1999), together with cultural journalism and consumer journalism, that aims to help the audiences with challenges in their private lives, like health, economy, and social relations. From and Kristensen (2018, 723) argue that service journalism, and thus lifestyle journalism, is characterized by, (1) being engaged with a broad set of topics related to all aspects people’s everyday lives; consumer-related issues but also more politically charged issues, (2) the mode of addressing audiences as both consumers but also as citizens, (3) providing readers with advice and “news you can use”, and (4) journalists taking a more active role in engaging in solving problems in people’s everyday lives.

The idea that lifestyle journalism addresses their audiences only as consumers and not as citizens, in contrast to political journalism, has been questioned also with respect to “green lifestyle journalism” (Craig 2016; Deuze 2005; Lewis, Cushion, and Thomas 2005). One function of journalism on green lifestyles has been to show how one can live more sustainably (Craig 2016; Howarth 2012). There is also evidence that parts of the audiences want the coverage of climate change to provide practical advice on how to live more climate friendly (Willig, Blach-Ørsten, and Burka 2022).

Moreover, From and Kristensen (2019) argue that approaches from service journalism have been important in the development of new genres of hard news, in particular constructive journalism. “[The] journalistic tools applied in constructive journalism and its modes of addressing audiences are, in some respects, in line with … modes of addressing audiences in service journalism, and lifestyle journalism more specifically, and the hybrid audience identity encapsulated by these types of journalism" (p. 19). From and Kristensen (2018; 2019) thus suggest that constructive journalism and lifestyle journalism are based on the same pair of normative ideas:

1. The mode of addressing their audiences as both consumers, citizens, and clients.

2. The role of journalists as providers of advice and solutions.

We will take this suggestion by From and Kristensen (2018; 2019) as the basis of our own definition of constructive journalism on climate and lifestyle, spelled out below. But the question arises if also the journalists will connect lifestyle journalism and constructive journalism in the way suggested here. If journalists do indeed think of constructive journalism and lifestyle journalism as overlapping genres, one would expect that their attitudes to lifestyle journalism are related in systematic ways to their attitudes to constructive journalism. The supposedly close conceptual connection between lifestyle journalism and constructive journalism thus gives rise to the following research question:

RQ2. Is there a relationship between how journalists evaluate the importance of journalism on climate change and lifestyle and how they evaluate constructive journalism on climate change and lifestyles?

Constructive Journalism vs. Advocacy

As conceived here, constructive journalism overlaps with “solutions journalism”, defined as journalism that “rigorously reports stories about how people are responding to problems” (McIntyre and Lough 2021). Both proponents of constructive journalism and journalists active in the Solutions Journalism Network argue that it is important not only to expose social problems but to also create attention to solutions to those problems, thereby providing a more comprehensive picture to the issues (Haagerup 2017; McIntyre and Lough 2021). Furthermore, supporters of both approaches are concerned that solutions-oriented approaches uphold journalistic ideals of accuracy and objectivity (Aitamurto and Varma 2018). However, the question has been raised whether constitutive norms of objectivity and impartiality are challenged by the agenda of constructive journalism (Haagerup 2017). And, as McIntyre and Lough (2021) observe, there is a possible tension also within solutions journalism, between the ideal of objectivity and the aim to help improve society. Reflecting on this, they suggest that “the relationship between objectivity and advocacy seems to be more of a continuum than a dichotomy, and scholars should continue to explore this topic as it pertains to solutions journalism” (1569).

A parallel discussion has been going on about the inclusion of elements of constructive journalism in reporting on climate change. Fahy (2018) argues that there has been a development from “the tyranny of balance” and “balance as bias” (Boykoff and Boykoff 2004) to a reporting where journalists use their knowledge of the scientific consensus on climate change and move in the direction of trying to reflect the “weight of the evidence”, in “interpretative” journalism on climate change (Brüggemann and Engesser 2017; Brüggemann, Frech, and Schäfer 2022). This trend in climate change journalism tries to move away from the old idea of impartiality as non-partisanship, while still maintaining a strong commitment to the core journalistic norms of accuracy and factuality (Brüggemann, Frech, and Schäfer 2022; Fahy 2018). Like McIntyre and Lough (2021) above, Fahy (2018) argues that the dichotomy of objectivity versus advocacy is too simplistic, and that instead it should be recognized that there is a spectrum of possible interpretations of the conception of objectivity as impartiality and thus that there can be different notions of constructive journalism. Not everyone will agree to these claims and there is not a consensus on exactly where to draw the line between proper journalism and advocacy (Aitamurto and Varma 2018). The question is if there will be disagreement over constructivism also when it comes to journalism on climate and lifestyle between journalists in our material. Our third research question is:

RQ3. To what extent is there disagreement over the role of constructive journalism as an approach to the coverage of climate change and lifestyles?

Accepting the second part of the claim made by Fahy (2018), above, we think that different interpretations of constructivism is possible, and propose a distinction between a weak and a strong form of constructivism with journalism on climate change and lifestyle. Above we argued, following From and Kristensen (2019) that the characteristic feature of constructive journalism is that it provides advice and solutions. But advice and solutions can be given in different ways and a distinction can be made between showing people what they could do, and telling people what they should do. A weak form of constructivism, we suggest, is to provide the audience with information that shows what they could do if they want to live more climate friendly; while the strong form of constructivism takes a further step in the direction of activism by not only informing about possible climate friendly choices but also tell their audience that they should make these choices. In other words, the weak form of constructivism provides advice and solutions in a way that leaves it up to the audience to conclude what to do, while the strong form draws the conclusion for them.

Summing up, we define constructive lifestyle journalism on climate change as journalism that (1) addresses individuals in (2) their complex of roles as consumers, citizens, and clients, with (3) advice and solutions for how to live in more climate friendly ways, by either (a) showing audiences what they could do, or (b) telling audiences what they should do.

Data and Methods

Empirically, we draw on original survey data collected February/March 2021 by Respons Analyse as a part of a larger online survey called the Media Survey. Respons Analyse recruited participants among members of the Norwegian Union of Journalists (Norsk Journalistlag) and Association of Norwegian Editors (Norsk Redaktørforening). The survey was sent out to all active union members, excluding student members and retired members, via email from the two unions to their members. 847 members of the Norwegian Union of Journalists (response rate = 14%) and 158 members of the Association of Norwegian Editors (response rate = 21%) participated in the survey. In the analyses, we do not distinguish between editors and journalist, but instead refer to journalistic professionals.

While the share of the unionized journalistic professionals is high in Norway (Hovden and Esperås 2014), our sample is only representative of the unionized population of Norwegian editors and journalists, and not necessarily of the entire population of Norwegian journalists and editors.

Our data is openly available for researchers via the Norwegian Social Science Data Archive.

Measures

Independent Measures

Demographic Variables: Gender, Age, and Journalistic Beats

Gender: women (43%), men (57%). Age: 18–24 (1%), 25–34 (15%), 35–44 (21%), 45–54 (29%), 55–64 (29%), 65+ (5%). Journalistic beat: The respondents were asked to indicate their area of journalistic work by selecting one or more items from a pre-defined list of journalistic beats: Economy (33%), Politics (34%), Culture (25%), Crime and accidents (22%), Entertainment and celebrities (8%), Sports (11.5%), Foreign affairs (10%), Commentary and op eds (11.5%), Other, (27%).³

Prior Experience with Reporting on Climate and Lifestyle

To assess whether respondents had prior experience with climate and lifestyle reporting, we asked “Approximately how many times, during the last 12 months, have you produced stories about climate and lifestyle yourself?”, with the scale “Never”, “No articles on this topic in the last 12 month”, “1–3 times”, and “More than 3 times”.

Reporting on Climate and Lifestyle as Constructive Journalism

We asked those that said they had written about climate and lifestyle recently (i.e., 1–3 times, or more than 3 times, in the last 12 months): “Do you consider any of the reports you have written about climate and lifestyle to be examples of “constructive journalism”?”, with the scale “Yes” and “No”. We asked this question without providing a definition of “constructive journalism”, because we were interested in their attitude to the concept and if they were willing to consider their work through this lens.

The Importance of Journalism on Climate and Lifestyle Versus Journalism on the Systemic Aspects of Climate Change

Here we ask: “In your opinion, which type of journalism about climate change is more important: lifestyle or critical reporting on the system?” Respondents were asked to identify their position on a seven-point scale anchored on 1 (System-critical is most important) to 7 (Lifestyle is most important). The question was motivated by the distinction between journalism on the relation between lifestyle and climate change, versus journalism on the system level issues of climate change.

Dependent Measure

Goals of Journalism on Climate and Lifestyle

“In your opinion, what should the goals of journalism about climate and lifestyle be?” Here we provided the respondents with a list of 9 alternative goals and asked them to select the three they found the most important. We restricted the number of alternatives the respondents could select to three goals, to make them prioritize among the suggested goals. We refer to the trio of selected goals as the respondent’s goal profile.

The aim of the list of goals was not to give a comprehensive menu of journalistic goals. The list was designed to capture the extent to which the respondents thought climate change on journalism on lifestyles should have a constructivist agenda and was based on our definition of constructive journalism on climate change and lifestyle. There are five groups of goals on the list. The first group (A1-A3) consists of three goals that in different ways express the strong form of constructivism: (A1) “Stimulate people to make more climate friendly choices”, (A2) “Show readers that they can do something themselves”, (A3) “Give advice⁴ for living more climate friendly”. The goals in the second group express the weak form of constructivism: (B1) “Provide information about the consequences of lifestyle choices”, (B2) “Help consumers make more informed choices”. The third type of goal is to cover climate issues in a way that allow the audience to relate the issues to their own experiences, an adaptation of a frequently used approach in Norwegian journalism (Hornmoen, Roksvold, and Alnæs 2015): (C1) “Bringing climate issues closer to people’s everyday lives”. The next two groups consist of contrastive goals that offer respondents three non-constructive alternatives. One type of goal is simply to reach a broad audience. (D1) “Publish stories many people want to read”. The two goals in the fifth group express overarching journalistic goals of providing critical information and creating public debate. They are adapted from principles in the Code of Ethics for the Norwegian Press⁵ (PFU 2020): (E1) “Provide critical light on climate issues”, (E2) “Create debate about climate issues.” Note that there are no conflicts between the nine goals, so that any combination of the alternatives is logically and normatively consistent.

We consider goal profiles to be non-constructive if they consist of only goals from the groups C-D-E and constructive if they include goals from groups A or B. But clearly, goal profiles can differ in levels of “constructiveness”, depending on the number and strength of the constructive goals included. To be able to compare the levels of constructiveness of the respondent’s goal profiles we give a score to each goal in the profile and then take the rounded sum of the scores to get the score of the goal profile. The goals are scored in this way (Table 1).

Table 1. Constructiveness scores of the five types of goals.

Investigative E1–E2	Audience reach D1	Individual address C1	Weakly constructive B1–B2	Strongly constructive A1–A3
0.1 point	0.5 point	1.0 point	2.0 points	3.0 points

The intuitive reason we chose to give (D1) a higher score than (E1–E2) is that, taking C1 as a reference point, (D1) is closer to (C1) than the E-goals are, by being more directly directed towards the interests of the audience. But the exact scores here are not important. What is important is that the sum of (D1) + (E1) + (E2) < 1.

Note that this system of scores is only a technical device designed to preserve when aggregating from goals to profiles information about the extent to which a goal profile includes weakly constructive, strongly constructive, or only non-constructive goals: goal profiles that sums to less than 2 points cannot include a constructive goal, goal profiles with a constructiveness score between 2 and 4 must have at least one weakly constructive goal, and goal profiles that score above 6 points must have at least one strongly constructive goal. In general, goal profiles with scores on the interval 2–9 points represent different levels of support for constructivism in journalism about climate and lifestyles.

We regressed the constructiveness score of the respondents’ goal profiles on the demographic variables, self-reported previous experience with writing constructively about climate and lifestyle, journalistic beats, and on the rating of the importance of journalism on climate and lifestyle (see the Appendix).

Open questions. We use both closed-ended questions and free text comments/answers to open-ended questions (Stoneman, Sturgis, and Allum 2013). The use of closed-ended questions may suffer from some bias, as they may emphasize aspects that are different from those respondents themselves would have chosen, if given a choice. We therefore also use open-ended questions where respondents can freely formulate their views in their own words and within their own framings (Fløttum 2017; Tvinnereim et al. 2017; Tvinnereim and Fløttum 2015).

Results

Around one-third (32%, 251 out of 1005) respondents reported that they had written an article about climate and lifestyles in the last 12 months. The respondents also indicated, by selecting from a list of pre-defined alternatives, what areas they typically cover as journalists. Figure 2 shows the distribution of these selections among journalists that reported that they had written about climate and lifestyle.

Figure 2. The fields of journalists among those who answered that they have written about climate and lifestyles.

Figure 2 shows that journalists from different beats, in particular journalists working on economics, politics, crime and accidents, and culture, cover climate and lifestyle issues. This result indicates an answer to our (RQ1a): while there is some coverage of lifestyle and climate in all beats, the extent of the coverage of this kind varies considerably.

In response to the follow-up question, three quarters (74%) of those who had written about climate and lifestyles in the last year said that they considered these stories to be “constructive journalism”.

There were 25 who submitted free-text comments to this question. Three of these were critical of the notion of “constructive journalism” and argued that journalism should have no agenda beyond critical investigation of social problems. Four commented that they were unable to answer the question because they found the concept of “constructive journalism” unclear.

Normative Evaluations of Lifestyle Journalism on Climate

In this section, we turn to the analyses of how journalists normatively assess journalism on climate and lifestyle as compared to covering climate change from a systems perspective. Figure 3 shows how the respondents evaluated this question.

Figure 3. Distributions of answers to the question “In your opinion, which type of journalism about climate change is more important: lifestyle or critical reporting on the system?”

Figure 3 shows that almost one-third (31%) of the respondents choose the middle option (4: equally important), indicating that they think both types of climate journalism are important. However, around half of the respondents indicate, choosing points 1–3, that system critical reporting is relatively more important, and half of these respondents indicated (1: system critical) that they think system critical reporting on climate is more important than reporting on lifestyle. Around a fifth of the respondents indicate that they think reporting on lifestyle in relation to climate change is more important. So, while the opinions are divided, the majority think system critical reporting is the more important kind of climate journalism, compared to lifestyle journalism.

Goals of Reporting on Climate Change and Lifestyles

We now turn to the analysis of the patterns in the respondent’s choices of goals of journalism on climate and lifestyles. Table 2 charts the distribution of responses to the question: “In your opinion, what should the goals of journalism about climate and lifestyle be?”

Table 2. Responses to the question: “In your opinion, what should the goals of journalism about climate and lifestyle be?” Respondents were asked to choose the three they found the most important on the list.

Goals	% selections
A1. Stimulate people to make more climate friendly choices	19
A2. Show readers that they can do something themselves	14
A3. Give advice for living more climate friendly	10
B1. Provide information about the consequences of lifestyle choices	36
B2. Help consumers make more informed choices	33
C1. Bringing climate issues closer to people’s everyday lives	54
D1. Publish stories many people want to read	15
E1. Provide critical light on climate issues	44
E2. Create debate about climate issues	39

We note, first, that the most frequently chosen goal is to bring the climate crisis closer to people’s everyday lives (C1) while the second most frequently chosen goals are the investigative, non-constructivist goals E1 and E2. We note that the mean of the percentages in the B-group is 34 and 14 in the A-group, i.e., that the respondents find the strongly constructivist goals (A1-A3) much less attractive than the weakly constructivist goals (B1 and B2).

The respondents selected 108 different combinations of goals, meaning that almost every possible combination was selected by at least one respondent.⁶ The 10 most popular goal profiles are depicted in Table 3.

Table 3. The 10 most frequent goal profiles, making up 1/3 of the profiles.

E1–E2	B1–B2–C1	E1–B1–C1	E1–E2–B1	E2–B1–C1	E1–B2–C1	E2–B1–B2	E2–B2–C1	E1	E1–B2–C1
71	49	46	44	39	32	31	27	25	25

We see that the investigative goals (E1 and E2) appear in 9 out of the 10 most frequent goal profiles and that the goal of bringing the climate issues closer to people’s everyday lives (C1) is included in seven of the ten most popular profiles. The two weakly constructive goals (B1–B2) are chosen together with C1 in the second most popular goal profile. Not all respondents selected three alternatives. The second to last columns show that 25 respondents selected only the alternative “Provide critical light on climate issues”. 40 respondents did not select any alternative.

As explained above, we quantified the respondents’ constructiveness score by taking the rounded sums of the scores of the goals in the goal profile. Figure 4 shows the distribution of the constructiveness scores of the respondents:

Figure 4. Distribution of the constructiveness scores of the goal profiles.

The goal profiles with 0 points, represented by the column to the far left, consist of only investigative goals (E1–E2). The second column (1 point) are goal profiles without any of the constructive goals, i.e., mostly combinations of the investigative goals (E1 and E2) and the goal of bringing climate issues closer to people’s everyday lives (C1). The third column (2 points) are goal profiles that combine one of the investigative goals (E1 or E2) with one of the weakly constructive goals (B1 or B2). The fourth column (3 points) represents mostly combinations of one of the weakly constructive goals (B1 or B2), the goal of bringing climate issues closer (C1), and one of the investigative goals (E1 or E2). Different profiles get 4 points (the fifth column), but all these profiles include at least one weakly constructive goal (B1 or B2) or one of the strongly constructive goals (A1, A2 or A3). The 5-point column (the sixth column) are profiles that include either both weakly constructive goals (B1 and B2), or one weakly constructive and one strongly constructive goal (A1, A2 or A3). To get 6 points (the seventh column) a profile must include at least one strongly constructive goal. To get 7 points (the 8th column) the profile must include one strongly constructive goal (A1, A2 or A3) and both two weakly constructive goal (B1 and B2), or two of the strongly constructive goal. The next to last column (8 points) consists of goal profiles that include two constructive goals, while the last column (9 points) represents the single profile with all and only strongly constructive goals.

Summing up, Figure 4 shows that the most frequent scores are 3 and 4 and that 68% of the goal profiles have a score of 3 or higher, i.e., two-thirds of the profiles are constructive in the sense that they contain one or more of the constructive goals. On the other hand, 25% of the goal profiles do not contain either type of constructive goals (columns 1 and 2 in Figure 4). We also note that 66% (639 profiles) of the respondents selected at least one of the investigative goals, 38% (364 profiles) selected at least one of the strongly constructivist goals, and 18% (172 profiles) included both an investigative and a strongly constructivist goal.

The appendix shows the result of regressing the scores of goal profiles on age, gender, journalistic beat, previous experience with writing constructively about climate and lifestyles, and the rating of the relative importance of journalism on climate and lifestyle. The result provides support for an affirmative answer to RQ2: those that evaluate the coverage of climate change and lifestyle as relatively more important than covering the systemic dimensions of climate change are significantly more likely to choose goal profiles with a higher constructivism score. Also, female journalists are significantly more likely to select constructive goals.

Discussion

Our first research question (RQ1a) was: “To what extent do journalists from different journalistic beats cover climate and lifestyle issues?” The question was motivated by the observation that climate change affects our everyday lives in many ways, and through many different routes. Importantly, issues of climate and lifestyles are deeply embedded in political and economic processes. This means that the effects of climate change on lifestyle choices and the effects our lifestyles have on the climate will give rise to issues that require coverage by journalists from a wide range of journalistic beats. By looking at the backgrounds of the journalists who reported that they had recently written on climate and lifestyle (Figure 2) we found that journalists covering politics and economy are those that most often write about climate and lifestyles. This reflects the importance of the political and economic aspects of the relationships between climate change and lifestyles, we suggest. Also, in the free text comments a handful of the respondents (i.e., 10 of them) provided examples of stories they had written about climate and lifestyles. The examples indicate that these journalists thought of journalism on climate and lifestyles as a much broader field than coverage of, for example, green consumption.

However, while there were journalists from all journalistic beats who reported that they had recently written about climate and lifestyle, the numbers are quite low for some beats. In comparison with the potential identified by Covering Climate Now (2021) for cross-cutting coverage of the consequences of climate change for lifestyle issues, the coverage of these topics across different beats that we observe, cannot be characterized as extensive.

Our second research question (RQ2) was: “Is there a relationship between how journalists evaluate the importance of journalism on climate change and lifestyle and how they evaluate constructive journalism on climate change and lifestyles?” The question was motivated by the suggestion that lifestyle journalism and constructive journalism are based in the same underlying approach to journalism (From and Kristensen 2019). Based on this, our further assumption was that if also journalists think of constructive journalism and lifestyle journalism as overlapping genres, one will perhaps expect that their attitudes to lifestyle journalism are related in systematic ways to their attitudes to constructive journalism.

We approached this question in two steps. First, we charted how the respondents evaluated the importance of covering climate change from a lifestyle perspective as compared with covering systemic aspects of climate change. We found that roughly 50% thought the systemic coverage was more important, 20% thought lifestyle coverage was more important, while 30% thought they were equally important. In a second step, we analysed the distribution of the goal profiles of the respondents. We found that 68% of the respondents had goal profiles that included at least one weakly constructive goal, i.e., more than two-thirds of the respondents think journalism on climate and lifestyles should to some extent provide advice and solutions on how to live more climate friendly. More than half of these, 38% of the respondents, included in their goal profile one of the strongly constructive goals. This suggests a tendency among most of the journalists to associate lifestyle journalism on climate and lifestyle with constructive journalism.

Through a regression analysis, we found a systematic relationship between thinking that covering climate change and lifestyle is relatively more important than covering the systemic aspects of climate change and a higher level of constructiveness as measured by the constructiveness score. This provides direct support for an affirmative answer to RQ2. The result also provides support for the conceptual characterization of the relationship between constructive journalism and lifestyle journalism, proposed by From and Kristensen (2019).

We also see evidence for a connection between journalism on climate and lifestyle and constructive journalism in the fact that as many as three quarters (74%) of those that said they had written about climate and lifestyle said that they thought of this reporting as constructive journalism. While it is valuable to have their independent judgement on the issue, we cannot know how exactly they interpreted the concept of “constructive journalism” since we did not provide the respondents with an explicit definition. However, we note that the percentage of respondents who say they have written constructively about lifestyle and climate (74%) and the percentage of respondents that chose at least one of the constructive goals (68%) are not wildly different. A very large difference here would have indicated that our definition of constructive journalism was at odds with that of the journalists in the study.

The patterns of goal profiles also show that the journalists differ in how they conceive of the roles that journalists covering lifestyle and climate change should take on. These patterns can to some extent be matched to results on how journalists specializing in lifestyle journalism conceive of their roles (Hanitzsch and Vos 2016; Hanusch 2019). First, the most frequently selected goal profiles in our study combine the C-goal of bringing the issue of climate change closer to people’s lives, with one of the investigative E-goals, and one of the weakly constructive B-goals. This combination reflects a role conception like the one Hanusch (2019) calls “community advocate”. In this role, the lifestyle journalism follows traditional journalistic ideals to “create communities of audiences”, by “investigating moral and ethical aspects of lifestyles, as well as fulfilling a watchdog role through scrutinizing lifestyle businesses” (Hanusch 2019, 206). The “community advocate” was the role conception that got the least support in Hanusch’s (2019) study.

We also see clear parallels between the role of lifestyle journalists as “service providers” (Hanusch 2019, 205) and the ambitions underlying the weakly constructive goals. In the role “service provider” the lifestyle journalist addresses her audiences in a “hybrid social identity of a mix of citizen, consumer and client”, with the aim “to provide information, advice and reviews of new products and trends” (Hanusch 2019, 205). Correspondingly, the weakly constructive goals aim to provide the audience with information about the climate consequences of lifestyle choices and to help consumers make more informed choices. Quite a few respondents chose a goal profile that included both weakly constructive goals.

The third role identified by Hanusch (2019) is that of a “life coach” who tries to “help audiences navigate through their lives by providing motivational advice and examples". This role conception is reflected in goal profiles that include the strongly and weakly constructive goals in combination with the goal of bringing climate issues to people’s everyday lives.

The role type in Hanusch (2019) calls “inspiring entertainer” is, on the face of it, more difficult to map to the structures of goal profiles. After all, none of our goals express an ambition to provide the audience with content that is “fun and entertaining”. However, this role is also characterized by an ambition to be “inspiring” and to play the role of “mood managers” trying to “boost emotional well-being” (Hanitzsch and Vos 2016; Hanusch 2019). The strongly constructive goals share some of these features, in the sense that they aim to create hope and to inspire. While the role of “inspiring entertainer” was the role conception found to get the most support by Hanusch (2019), the strongly constructive goals were the least attractive to the respondents in our study.

While there are limitations to these comparisons, we think that it highlights some of the characteristic features of lifestyle journalism in the context of climate change.

Our third research question (RQ3) was: “To what extent is there disagreement over the role of constructive journalism as an approach to the coverage of climate change and lifestyles?” First, we saw that there were a few comments submitted as free text that were critical of the very idea of constructive journalism, either for being at odds with the role of journalism or for being unclear. Second, some of the respondents (54 profiles, 5%) chose to ignore the instructions to pick three goals of journalism on climate and lifestyle and chose only one or two of the investigative goals. We see these as clear rejections of the constructive goals. Third, 193 (25%) selected three options but their goal profiles did not contain any of the constructive goals. This also suggests some level of skepticism towards the constructive goals. However, since the respondents were asked to choose only three alternatives this could be a prioritization of the non-constructive goals over the constructive goals rather than a rejection of the constructive goals. All the goals presented to the respondents can be consistently combined. The same point applies to those that chose to include only (weakly and/or strongly) constructive goals in their goal profiles: they cannot reasonably be assumed to reject the non-constructive goals. There is also evidence of some disagreement over the weakly and strongly constructive goals: the group of strongly constructivist goals were systematically less popular than the group of weakly constructive goals.

Overall, the results related to RQ3 therefore do provide evidence that there is real disagreement over the role of constructive journalism on climate change and lifestyle. Furthermore, the fact that those that think covering climate change from a system-level perspective is more important, have goal profiles with lower scores of constructiveness, shows that the disagreement over constructiveness is connected to a perhaps deeper disagreement over the very role of lifestyle journalism in the coverage of climate change.

McIntyre and Lough (2021) observe a tension within the community of solutions journalists, between a commitment to the traditional journalistic norms of objectivity and those that want to include mobilizing material in their reporting on solutions. We see in our study a similar tension between the strong support for the combination of weakly constructive and traditional investigative goals and the minority that select goal profiles with only constructive goals.

One might have expected that younger journalists would have been more in favour of constructive journalism than older journalists, but this was not the case. Neither were those who had previously written constructively about climate and lifestyle more likely to choose constructive goals than those who had not. This suggests, perhaps, that the same journalists who cover climate change from a lifestyle perspective are also engaged in system-critical journalism on climate change. Our analysis shows that respondents who identify as working with cultural issues are more likely to support constructive goals. Research has shown that cultural journalism often takes the form of service journalism (Eide 2020), a close relative of constructive journalism. Perhaps respondents working in this beat are generally more inclined towards constructive journalism.

Conclusion

In the introduction we mentioned the suggestion by Brüggemann, Frech, and Schäfer (2022), that the development of climate journalism is transformative, in two senses: (1) by more clearly aiming to contribute to the transformation of society in a more sustainable direction, and (2) by a tendency to more constructive journalism on climate change. Do our results show transformative tendencies in journalism in climate change and lifestyles? First, we do find a quite high level of constructivism in the goal profiles of our respondents. On the one hand, a high level of constructivism in lifestyle journalism is perhaps to be expected, in the light of the assumption that the two forms of journalism are based on the same underlying conceptions. On the other hand, the phenomenon under investigation—the complex relationships between climate change and lifestyles—affects a very broad set of issues related not only to individual consumption patterns but also to larger political and economic issues. That two-thirds of the journalists think that this broad range of issues should be covered constructively, suggests a transformative development. And the finding that many journalists covering climate change from political and economic perspectives also think of their reporting as constructive journalism points in the same direction.

Limitations

The most important limitation is that we have studied only how journalists themselves perceive their journalism and not analysed the stories the journalists have written in their coverage of climate change and lifestyle. A study of the coverage is necessary to get a more complete picture of the coverage across different beats and the extent to which it is constructive. This is a task for future research.

A further limitation is that when we asked the journalists for their experience with writing constructively about climate and lifestyles and constructive journalism, we did not provide the respondents with a definition of “constructive journalism”. Consequently, their interpretations of the question probably differed to some extent. This makes more uncertain the comparison between their self-reported experience with constructive journalism and our measurement of the levels of constructivism.

A third limitation is that we have not undertaken an independent validation of the instrument we use to chart the levels of constructiveness. While the list of goals is theoretically well motivated the goals could have been formulated in different ways. We did provide different formulations of the constructive goals on the list to alleviate this uncertainty but have not tested in other contexts responses to variations in formulations.

It is left to future studies to address the question of how journalists view the role of solutions-oriented and constructive approaches in the reporting on also the systemic aspects of climate change.

An obvious limitation, finally, is that our results are based only on data from only one country. Research that enables comparison with how journalists in other countries conceive of the role of lifestyle journalism on climate is necessary to determine how generalizable the results are.

Acknowledgment

We are grateful to Astrid Rommetveit for her helpful suggestions.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The work reported in the article was partly funded by the Research Council of Norway [grant 301103 (the CLIMLIFE project)].

Notes

1 https://coveringclimatenow.org/projects/covering-climate-now-statement-on-the-climate-emergency/.

2 https://journalisten.no/files/2020/01/28/Innholdsstrategi%20klima%20NRK.pdf.

3 Note that environmental journalism was not an item on this list.

4 Taken out of context the word “advice” could perhaps be given also a weakly constructive interpretation, telling people only what they could do. However, in the context of Norwegian journalism the phrase used in the survey, “Gi råd om hvordan man kan leve mer klimavennlig”, would most naturally have a strongly constructive interpretation, implying that the journalist is telling the audiences that they should live more climate friendly.

5 “The Role of the Press in Society. §1.2. The press has important functions in that it carries information, debates, and critical comments on current affairs.”

6 Theoretically, there are 84 possible combinations of three choices over 9 alternatives, but the number was higher than this since some selected only one alternative and some selected only two alternatives.

Appendix

Regression of the constructiveness scores on the evaluation of the importance of lifestyle journalism, demographic variables, self-reported experience with writing constructively about climate and lifestyle, and journalistic beats.

Table

	Dependent variable: Constructivism score
Importance of system critical vs. lifestyle journalism on climate	0.200*** (0.032)
Has written constructively about climate and lifestyle	−0.060 (0.144)
Age	−0.067 (0.056)
Gender: M—F	0.412*** (0.130)
Journalistic beats:
Domestic politics	0.110 (0.156)
Foreign politics	−0.171 (0.216)
Celebrities and entertainment	−0.054 (0.233)
Crime and accidents	−0.111 (0.164)
Culture	0.265* (0.154)
Economy	−0.195 (0.153)
Sports	0.123 (0.200)
Commentary, opinion	0.006 (0.208)
Other	0.070 (0.178)
Constant	3.115*** (0.286)
Observations:	965
R^2:	0.070
Adjusted R^2:	0.053
Residual Std. Error (df = 1003):	1.871 (df = 946)
F Statistic (df = 1; 1003):	3.972*** (df = 18; 946)

*p < 0.1; **p < 0.05; ***p < 0.01.