Marketing and Shaping Shanghai in Travel Writings: A Critical Analysis of the Evolving Tourism Discourse in the New York Times Travel Section
Abstract
Tourism discourse has been affirmed to be a site where tourist destinations are constantly invented, reinvented, produced and reproduced. More importantly, tourism discourse constantly undergoes variation along with the changing social context and the unfixed power relations between host and guest society. By using critical discourse analysis to analyze the New York Times travel writings covering Shanghai and tracing the evolving discourse, it is discovered that the newspaper increasingly projects the image of Shanghai as a metropolis for diverse consumption by adopting commercialized language, and consequently cultivates a homogenized discourse and routinized ways of viewing Shanghai. It is concluded that the changing discourse suggests the newspaper’s closer relationship with the tourism industry, and the travel writings have become the product of consensual marketing for profitability and reflect the collaborative relationship between the newspaper and the tourism industry of Shanghai.
Description
Keywords
Journalism, Mass Communications, Marketing
Citation
Wang, Y. (2016). Marketing and Shaping Shanghai in Travel Writings: A Critical Analysis of the Evolving Tourism Discourse in the New York Times Travel Section (Master's thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/26832