The best and the worst?
by Lito B. Zulueta
There are at least eight misconceptions about the lifestyle beat. The first is that it’s soft. But it’s not only soft—it’s also hard. The beat is both light and dark, flippant as well as serious. Diet and nutrition may be deliciously soft and a little frivolous, but obesity, eating disorders, and the menace of diabetes are life-and-death matters.
The second misconception owes to the first: that lifestyle is mere fashion and fad, trends and currents. This may be true to some extent, especially in the fashion world where collections are seasonal. But transience is not lifestyle’s exclusive privilege. News, whether hard or soft, is ephemeral. Here today, spoiled tomorrow.
It’s helpful now to explain what the lifestyle page is. The lifestyle page is a rather late contemporary evolution in journalism. It’s a rather late 20th century development in Ame-rican journalism, for example. If one goes by the history of the Washington Post, one of the United States’ most important general-interest papers, lifestyle has only been around in the last 50 years. Sally Quinn entered the Post only in 1969 as a “party” reporter for the “Style” section. Either word between quotation marks can substitute for lifestyle, which is what we now call that page which covers fashion and socials, and contains birthday, debut, and wedding bulletins.
In contrast, politics and war, sex and violence have been around for a far longer time than lifestyle: when Pulitzer and Hearst tried to outdo one another in sensationalizing the mys-terious explosion and sinking of the battleship Maine and the Spanish-American war that their warmongering yellow jour-nalism triggered, there were no fashion journalists around to take note of the fabric and colors used in the epaulets of either country’s navy.
But since the turn of the 20th century, perhaps because of a growing distaste for hard stuff like politics, wars and violence (sex not included), there has developed a taste for fine stuff (some of them admittedly fluff). And since life has become more varied and complex than politics and economics, there other beats have emerged: food and health, grooming and etiquette, education and child care, consumer products and consumerism, arts and culture, movies and enter-tainment, spirituality and “wellness,” and civic participation and advocacy. In short, what was “mere” style has become “lifestyle.”
Lifestyle has become everything, including the hard stuff. (The marriage of soft and hard in lifestyle journalism was more than embodied in the marriage of Quinn to the Post’s executive editor, Ben Bradlee.)
The all-encompassing nature of lifestyle journalism is more than prefigured in today’s dictionary definition of the word: “the habits, attitudes, tastes, moral standards, economic level, etc., that together constitute the mode of living of an individual or group” (Random House Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary, second edition).
The fact that the lifestyle page has become quite extensive in its concerns and amorphous in its content should illustrate the third misconception about it: that it is everything and nothing. Blame should be placed on publishers and executive editors who, failing to classify an event under the traditional beats, assign it to lifestyle. The section therefore has become the reinvention of what was earlier known as the features page.
The fact that lifestyle has become the repository and registry of both hard and soft should correct the fourth misconception about it: that political reporters or “hard” journalists cannot be lifestyle writers and vice-versa. Quinn first came to the style page as a political reporter: when she covered socials and parties, she wrote them with a political edge. My own journalism background runs counter to the usual lifestyle press career path: I came to it through political journalism. I had covered Malacañang, the Church, and practically all of the major government beats and had been an editorialist before I got involved in the Philippine Daily Inquirer Lifestyle section.
In the Philippines, the lifestyle page used to be known as the women’s section. Since the old newsroom was traditionally a male preserve, women-journalists were sent to cover parties, socials, and fashion shows. Eugenia Duran Apostol, Doris Trinidad Gamalinda and Gloria Garchitorena Goloy first earned their professional journalism spurs while covering the “women’s beat.”
Nowadays, we would call such an arrangement sexist, but there’s a lingering sexist attitude toward the lifestyle press, which is the fifth misconception about it—that it’s mainly the preserve of women and short of that, of “sissies” and “limp wrists.” It is true that there may be sexual determinism in the lifestyle page. However, while some biologically male writers fantasize about becoming the new Suzy Menkes or Anna Wintour, only women can become fashion critics of women’s fashion because only women know what women want. In the same way, only male writers can become men’s fashion critics. Their mothers, girlfriends, wives, daughters, and mistresses and the Fab 5 (the hosts of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy) may have a thing or two to say about male makeover and even pick for their men what underwear brand to wear, but men’s fashion is purely men’s business.
But save for fashion, a journalist of either sex can write informatively and creatively about other lifestyle issues such as fitness and health, diet and nutrition, arts and culture, education and parenting. Apostol, Gama-linda, and Goloy may have started as “women’s” writers, but they have tackled “masculine” challenges as well, such as publishing (e.g., Apostol, whose Inquirer and Pinoy Times helped topple two macho men, Marcos and Erap), literary analysis (Gamalinda, who has written eruditely of the allegories and allusions in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings), and sports (Goloy, who has no qualms about going to the men’s dugout or invading the men’s locker room for material for her sports features and profiles).
The rather comprehensive content of the lifestyle page is reflected in the generous number of pages it now gets so that it seems to have become the next major section after the first main section (news, op-ed, etc). But the pages have an economic determinant, which brings us to the sixth misconception about the lifestyle press—that like the rest of the media, it’s free and responsible. The fact that just about anything in the press is market-driven should remind readers that despite good intentions and attempts at professionalism, the press may fall short of the ideal.
But the strong market orientation of the press in general and the lifestyle page in particular should not make you cynical about the general dose of product endorsements and write-ups usually featured in the lifestyle pages and how lifestyle deskmen seem to turn a blind eye on such brazen attempts as advertorials. At least in the Inquirer, there are attempts at professional gate-keeping so as to check the seventh misconception about lifestyle journalism—that press releases especially from the luxury industry hardly get edited since they come with luxurious gifts. That’s not true in my corner of the press world where releases get edited even if they come with gifts. And whatever generous gifts we receive will not compensate for the Holy Week mortification of editing bad copy. Here’s a sample:
The trees, lampposts and halls, need not be the only ones decked with lights, colors and balls. Strap on some Nooka to exude the vibe of this season, with styles, designs and colors for each and every person. Christmas is about color, life and decors everywhere, with people always bustling around here and there.
Believe it or not, this alliterative nightmare is a news release! It comes from a shop selling watches known as Nooka. Nakakasuka. (Nauseating.)
Ah, but you say that the copy editor eventually transforms this terrible news release into good copy because he has after all received lavish gifts! So doesn’t corruption hide behind the frippery and perfumed veneer of the lifestyle page? Is the lifestyle page the most corrupt beat in journalism? Not necessarily, although there’s no justifying corruption. But in journalism as in government, we should not talk of “the most corrupt” but “the most graft-prone.” And according to hierarchy, lifestyle is not the most graft-prone of beats, contrary to the eighth misconception about it.
Lifestyle is less graft-prone than the other beats, as shown by a study our class made back in journalism school at the University of Santo Tomas. The Top Three graft-prone beats? They’re business, sports, and entertainment.
Ah but you say, that’s like saying lifestyle is the best of the worst! And isn’t entertainment a part of lifestyle? And don’t business and sports have a lifestyle angle?
Like the business of lifestyle, these questions are dizzying. Even nauseating.
- Lito B. Zulueta is arts and culture subsection editor at the Philippine Daily Inquirer. |
