Doing Digital but Prioritising Print: Functional Differentiation in Women’s Magazines in Singapore

Digitalisation has prompted a myriad of changes in the journalism industry. This has affected different aspects of news work, particularly in newsroom production processes. Though such changes have received much scholarly attention, most studies have focused on hard news and less so on magazines and lifestyle journalism. However, magazines and lifestyle journalism are part of the broader journalism field and similarly deserve their own investigations. Boczkowski (2005. Digitizing the News. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press) identified three production factors that are especially relevant with respect to the adoption of digital technologies in newsrooms: organisational structures, work practices, and representations of users. Through in-depth interviews with 24 journalists from Singaporean women’s magazines, we looked at how technological advances have affected the three production factors in these magazines. The findings suggest that there is a functional differentiation (Hanusch, F. 2017. “Web Analytics and the Functional Differentiation of Journalism Cultures: Individual, Organizational and Platform-specific Influences on Newswork.” Information, Communication & Society 20 (10): 1571–1586) in magazine newsrooms, where magazine journalists adopt different values, norms, and practices when engaging in print and digital productions. This has led to the development of distinct journalistic sub-cultures in a single newsroom, and a progressively divergent rather than convergent media environment.