journal entry December 6th

First off, I have been meaning to add this to my weekly entry but I keep forgetting. I cannot believe that The Guardian has a section for the occupy protests, and the New York Times does not. Moving right along.....

Earlier this week my friend forwarded me her fashion blog which is published in her school newspaper at Emory College. It got me thinking about fashion related to journalism. Right next to articles in the New York Times that deal with serious cultural issues, one can easily find an “article” about how to master metallic makeup this holiday season. I began to wonder at what point in history did newspapers start publishing stories about trends dealing with fashion? I realized this is one major similarly that most newspapers share. Whether you are reading the Guardian, the Times, or the Tribune all of these periodicals have a section dedicated to fashion trends. This is also the only section of the paper that does not need to worry about bias’s. People don’t think about truth or bias’s when reading these articles because we just assume that who ever is writing them has been given permission to write them for good reason. Can these articles be considered journalism if they don’t really need to worry about following the majority of journalistic rules? For this week’s journal I have decided to look into these articles to answer some of my questions.

One thing I realized about these articles is they do in some ways follow the rules we have outlined in class. They ask specialists questions in order to make sense of what they are writing. What I found interesting is a lot of these journalists go to beauty magazines in order to ask around for trends. Journalists approaching another type of journalist for questions. 

Another interesting thing I noticed is that even though there is a style section for most news papers, the content of them differs quite a bit. When comparing the Tribune with the Times you can see a pretty big difference in the type of audience they are trying to appeal to. The Times is dripping with designer names, pictures of hipsters, and has a greater variety in the types of articles. The Tribune seems to be geared towards all ages and all classes. Their articles are much less factual than the times. They don’t have long stories behind their trends, instead most of their trends in fashion are just lists. 

I am still sort of on the fence as to whether or not these articles are true journalism. I am interested in learning who is responsible for putting these types of stories in news papers. I feel that in some cases, such as in the Times, the stories do follow a similar journalistic style. However, when its just a list of must have makeup it seems that belongs in Elle magazine as opposed to a periodical thats delivering news.