Ethnographic journalism

Abstract

Accounting for emerging journalistic genres is a difficult endeavor not least because there is little agreement as to what constitutes journalism itself. Doing so, however, is essential if we are to recognize changing journalistic doxas. To capture such changes, we must include a holistic framework that takes into account the position, commitment, role, writing and language of journalists as well as the scope, temporality, narrative and reproductive labor of texts. This article introduces such a framework. At a moment in time when multiculturalism poses evident challenges to the press and media trends require more contextual reporting, ethnographic journalism emerges in American feature journalism. Analyzed holistically, this genre is characterized as the employment of immersion strategies adopted from social science for distinct storytelling purposes. These methods, however, transform conventional journalistic epistemology, changing it through practice. In turn, the analysis reveals how journalism practices can evolve its troubled philosophical position.