The history of cultural journalism from a transnational perspective

This chapter introduces cultural journalism from a transnational perspective. First, it outlines cultural journalism as a subfield within journalism studies and discusses what ‘culture’ and the ‘transnational’ is or can be in this type of reporting. Second, this chapter outlines key findings from existing cultural journalism research, including the distinct professional nature of this type of journalism and the increasing volume and democratized interpretation of culture in the news media, especially since the mid-twentieth century. Most of these studies have applied national and/or Western comparative perspectives and only in few cases paid explicit attention to transnational dimensions. The third and concluding section discusses how this points to important tasks for future cultural journalism research.