Journalism
2016, Vol. 17(2) 260­–278
© The Author(s) 2014
Reprints and permissions:
sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1464884914555964
jou.sagepub.com
Ethnographic journalism
Anne Kirstine Hermann
University of Southern Denmark, Denmark
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.
Keywords
Anthropology, ethnographic journalism, ethnography, genres, immersion journalism,
journalism practices, sociology
‘[I]n some respects, sociology’s most powerful competition comes from journalistic
ethnographers, notably book writers, who may not have ever taken a sociology
course but are trained or self-trained in fieldwork and intensive interviewing’.
(Gans, 2010: 100)
Corresponding author:
Anne Kirstine Hermann, Centre for Journalism, University of Southern Denmark, Campusvej 55, 5230
Odense M, Denmark.
Email: aher@journalism.sdu.dk
555964JOU0010.1177/1464884914555964
research-article2014
Article
Hermann	 261
The relationship between ethnographers and journalists is often a site of mutual suspicion.
Journalism’s predominantly positivist paradigm fuels the contempt of postmodern
social scientists. Conversely, journalists frown upon the inert jargon of much academic
writing and its inability to assert relevance. Yet, the inherent overlaps of journalism and
ethnography escape few scholars conducting newsroom studies or using other ethnographically
informed methods. Moreover, ethnography has emerged as an explicitly
accentuated ideal for reporters in the United States who attempt to portray human environments
from within. Especially, long-form literary reporting and public ethnography
seem inherently related (Boyer, 2010: 6; Sefcovic, 1995).
This kinship is not new. As a former journalist, American sociologist Robert Park
drew heavily on journalistic practices as he propelled qualitative research within the
social sciences by transforming the University of Chicago into a pioneer center for participant-observer-based
fieldwork at the turn of the last century (Iorio, 2004: 7; Lindner,
1990 [1996]). And as early as the 1880s, Nellie Bly, a reporter at Joseph Pulitzer’s The
New York World, simulated insanity to study a mental institution from within. Her articles
and subsequent book, Ten Days in a Mad-House, might be the earliest example for
journalistic ethnography. The tradition continued with works like George Orwell’s 1933
immersion into poverty, Down and Out in Paris and London, John Hersey’s 1946 series
for The New Yorker, and subsequent book Hiroshima on the aftermath of the atomic
bombing, and Hunter S. Thompson’s 1967 combination of ‘journalistic sensationalism
with an extreme form of ethnographic participant observation’in Hell’s Angels: A Strange
and Terrible Saga (Sefcovic, 1995: 20). These are just a few of the many journalistic
works that mastered essentially ethnographic methods.
But only in recent decades have journalists and anthropologists employed ‘ethnographic
journalism’(Cramer and McDevitt, 2004) and related terms like ‘anthro-journalism’
(Fillmore, 1987), ‘literary documentary journalism’ (Harrington, 2003), ‘new new
journalism’(Boynton, 2005), and ‘cultural journalism’(Bird, 1987) to describe a journalism
using research methods derived from traditional ethnographic approaches. In other
words, while ethnographic journalism itself did not recently emerge, its distinct ethnographic
qualities have only recently been appreciated and categorized as such. Empirical
work on the genre is still limited, however, and observers tend to engage with it normatively,
championing its virtues, rather than descriptively analyzing it. This article not
only presents an analysis of ethnographic journalism but also a model for analyzing
normative currents of journalistic practices generally. I argue that ethnographic journalism
is essentially the use of social scientific immersion strategies, like participant-observation,
and the concurrent remodeling of journalism’s epistemic makeup. This reveals
how journalism is an acquired process of sense making made up of changing philosophical,
practical and expressional parts. Furthermore, these practices may be a requisite
response to some evident trends in the press, such as the surge in contextual reporting
and some of its challenges, for example, mediating the multicultural society.
Negotiating the boundaries of journalism
‘Nothing disables journalists more than thinking that current practice is somehow in the
nature of things’, wrote James Carey (1997a: 331). But imagining journalism to have a
262	 Journalism 17(2)
natural, predetermined essence also disables scholarly analyses. Journalistic diversity is
evident from the development of a myriad of genres over the past century challenging
traditional journalism on separate levels. Consider how genres like interpretive journalism
(MacDougall, 1938) and precision journalism (Meyer, 1973 [2002]) revolted against the
epistemic regimes of conventional news by promoting interpretive and analytical rather
than objective practices. And how public journalism (Glasser, 1999) and intimate journalism
(Harrington, 1997) challenged mainstream reporting strategies by approaching people
as participants and focusing on the ordinary, rather than the extraordinary.Additionally,
new journalism (Wolfe, 1973) and literary journalism (Sims and Kramer, 1995) violated
conventional styles of writing by adopting elements from fiction. Individually, such in(ter)
ventions, along with many other genres, challenged and expanded the philosophies, practices,
and expressions of journalism. Collectively, they challenge our conception of journalism
as a coherent professional ideology based on objectivity, autonomy, public service,
immediacy, and ethics (Deuze, 2005).
But while journalism may be read as a curriculum containing many different ‘courses’
(Carey, 1986: 151), that is, genres, journalism scholarship accounts for just a small part
of this contemporary catalog (Zelizer, 2004: 6, 213–214). ‘Critical incidents’ in journalism
can help us decipher conventions of journalistic practice and authority, Zelizer
(1992) argues, describing these incidents as ‘hot moments’ by which people ‘air, challenge
and negotiate their own boundaries of practice’ (p. 67). For journalists, she writes,
such incidents include the Watergate scandal, the Kennedy assassination and the Vietnam
War. For second-order observers, i.e. journalism scholars, such incidents may include the
pronounced emerging of new genres. By using ethnographically informed methods, contemporary
journalistic ethnographies such as Ted Conover’s Newjack, Alex Kotlowich’s
There Are No Children Here, and Anne Fadiman’s The Spirit Catches You And You Fall
Down transgress dominant norms in journalism, allowing other journalists to consider
alternatives when making professional choices.
Since journalism is a truth business (Harcup, 2004: 81), its epistemic underpinnings
are essential to its practices. To explore how these epistemic assumptions and practices
are correlated, we may contemplate the practice of journalism through Bourdieu’s (1977:
73) notion ‘habitus’, described as the regulation of behavior by past conditions and present
possibilities of an agent. Habitus causes particular practices, without explicit reason
or intent, to be nonetheless ‘sensible’and ‘reasonable’(Bourdieu, 1977: 79). As such, the
practices of journalism are guided by epistemic standpoint as well as strategic sensibilities
and expressional possibilities. Thus, in our effort to obtain a holistic understanding
of journalism (Deuze, 2005; Skinner et al., 2001), we must examine the relationship
between journalistic epistemology and the strategies and styles of the field. By examining
these divergent aspirations, we can account for the way in which changing assumptions,
routines and narratives produce different notions of the desirable, probable,
possible, and impossible (Bourdieu, 1977: 78).
Accordingly, this article analyzes ethnographic journalism as it distends the epistemic
boundaries of journalistic craftsmanship, adopts new strategies for reporting and disregards
conventional styles of news writing. Journalism, as we know, is a slippery category and
providing a clear-cut definition of ethnographic journalism is equally tricky since it bleeds
into many neighboring genres. The efforts to arrive at a conceptualization, however, reveal
Hermann	 263
its central features. In turn, I suggest that ethnographic journalism may respond to the rise
of multiculturalism, generally, and context-aware journalism, specifically.
In this analysis, the epistemic level is understood as the logics and assumptions upon
which journalistic inquiry is based, explicitly or implicitly. Epistemology, understood as
the way in which we know, can be seen as a system of ideas fundamental to knowledge,
justification, experience, evidence and understanding and thus essential to the theorization
of any journalism. Precision journalism (Meyer, 1973 [2002]), for instance, exemplifies
how the adoption of scientific epistemology, though quite abstract, produced a
new kind of journalism.
While the end itself is determined on the epistemic level, the means or method for succeeding
operates on the strategic level. Including its audience as participants, public journalism
(Glasser, 1999) exemplifies how new strategic approaches changes journalism.
The stylistic level is the most concrete level and relates especially to the literary style
of the product. But such concerns may inform both the strategic and epistemic levels in
addition to being determined by them. New journalism (Wolfe, 1973) exemplifies the
impact of literary form on journalistic content.
Accordingly, these three levels structure the following analysis of ethnographic journalism.
This analysis, by necessity, will employ ideal types, in a Weberian sense, of
journalism and ethnography (Weber, 1949). These hypothetical idea-constructs are not
meant to correspond with any empirical example nor to statistical averages. Instead,
these are pure types illuminating common characteristics of conventional practices in
each field in order to analyze the space between the two. Throughout, I will include
examples from ethnographic journalist Ted Conover’s work to consistently illustrate the
theoretical contemplations. Using participant-observation as his primary reporting technique
since the 1980s, Conover has published numerous books and articles on hoboes,
illegal migrants, truck drivers, meat inspectors, prison guards, and other social groups.
Figure 1.  The epistemic, strategic, and stylistic levels of journalistic genres.
264	 Journalism 17(2)
Epistemic level
Starting on the epistemic level, ethnographic journalism challenges at least three aspects
of conventional journalism: its objectivity ideal, its preoccupation with singular events,
and its cultural values.
Objectivity dismissed
Conventional journalism relies upon commonsense positivism, most explicitly in its
objectivity ideal. This ideal includes not only ontological objectivity, i.e the belief that
one can accurately account for reality, but also procedural objectivity, that is, hearing
‘both sides’ of a story and eschewing interpretation. Conventional journalism also relies
upon epistemological objectivity, believing that an account is true if it rests upon certain
types of sources, methods, and evidence – namely facts (Ward, 2009). Conversely, ethnography
is a highly interpretive practice in which the researcher searches for meaning
rather than facts per se. Singer (2009: 192) juxtaposes the descriptive mode of journalism
to the ‘aim of ethnographic research’, defined as probing for meaning through contextual
‘thick description’(Geertz, 1973). As Sefcovic (1995: 21) writes of the difference
between journalistic and ethnographic approaches to data collection,
while the journalist is concerned with the who, what, when, where, how, and why of the event,
the ethnographer applies these questions to the process of data collection itself, determining
who shall be the source, where and when data may be obtained, and even ‘why [the data] … is
needed anyway’.
Additionally, in the wake of Michel Foucault’s (1970 [1994]) critique of the relationship
between power and knowledge, anthropology took a ‘reflexive turn’ propelled by
the so-called Writing Culture-movement (Clifford and Marcus, 1986). This signified a
growing awareness of the risk of objectifying of peoples and cultures and imposing one’s
own frame of reference onto the lived experiences of others.
In other words, combining ethnography and journalism involves significant epistemological
challenges concerning the objectivity norm of mainstream journalism (Bird, 2005;
Cramer and McDevitt, 2004: 137; Singer, 2009). Bird (2005) defines ‘an ethnographic
stance in journalism’ as having an interpretive, rather than factual, goal, reminiscent of
interpretive journalism, while Cramer and McDevitt (2004: 130) argue that ethnographic
journalists must exchange objectivity with ‘standpoint epistemology’. Ethnographic journalists
must examine the ‘inner truths’of group through immersion by which the members
of the group in question are the ultimate authorities regarding the significance of events
(Cramer and McDevitt, 2004: 128–130). Harrington (2003: 92), too, holds that the ‘journalistic
anthropologist’ includes a search for meaning. Consequently, ethnographic journalism
resembles genres like Tom Wolfe’s new journalism in its attempt at penetrating the
logics of ‘exotic groups’ and comprehending the world on their terms (Bird, 2005: 302–
303). Concluding that ethnography offers a means for journalists to recover essential but
neglected principles of their craft, Cramer and McDevitt (2004: 141) link this epistemic
end to the Commission of the Freedom of the Press’ (1947) call for the press to project ‘a
representative picture of the constituent groups in the society’ (p. 102).
Hermann	 265
This is evident in Conover’s reflections on his work. Describing his identity as a ‘rubber
band’ that expands to incorporate the role he takes on in a given community, Conover
rejects the idea of objectivity. In fact, he considers the acknowledgement of his own predispositions,
or ‘bias’ as he puts it, a source of ‘empowerment’ since it is a vehicle for penetrating
the logics of the communities he studies. This resembles the anthropological trope
of utilizing the ethnographer’s foreignness to a community in order to expose and question
the taken-for-granted. As Conover (2014) explained in one of my interviews with him,
In this day and age, the job is to acknowledge your bias and understand it and know that it’s a
limitation as well as an empowerment. I often think the measure of my success will be how much
I can accept and appreciate someone else’s point of view and allow it to coexist with my own.
Reporting from the margins, Conover negotiates traditional objectivity, which tends to
reproduce dominant paradigms (Carey, 1997b: 139), with, in his own words, ‘fairness’.
From event to entirety
However, the epistemology of an ethnographic journalism involves not just a departure
from objectivity but also attention to entireties. Mainstream journalism’s focus on singular
events over substantial social structures is another fundamental epistemological difference
between journalism and social science (Bird, 2005; Cramer and McDevitt, 2004;
Iorio, 2004; Grindal and Rhodes, 1987). Hannerz (2004) describes a certain division of
labor between ethnographers and journalists whereby the latter, witnessing and formulating
current events, sketch ‘the first draft of history’ (pp. 214–215). The event- and factdriven
mode of most journalism is correlated with the strategic and stylistic employment
of ‘angles’ in journalism. This creates a tendency to probe for preconceived aspects in
contrast to ethnography’s aim at contextualized, holistic interpretations (Bird, 2005;
Grindal and Rhodes, 1987; Singer, 2009). Working with angles has essential epistemological
implications:
Too often, journalists and their editors ‘know’what the story will be before they even start work
– they may even have leads running around in their heads. It becomes an easy task to prove that
this story is indeed the right one by asking the right sources the right questions and managing
to ignore issues that may come up in the course of the interview or the event. It is not deliberate
bias or distortion, but it is an inevitable byproduct of the particularistic, event-oriented
perception of the journalist. (Bird, 2005: 304)
This relates to the commoditized nature of journalism. Angles or ‘story lines’ organize
attention and contextualize research by reproducing preconceptions of the news consumer
(Hannerz, 2004: 217). As such, commonsense is a reference point that is reproduced, not
a phenomenon to be questioned, opposite ethnography.According to Cramer and McDevitt
(2004), ‘[t]his deductive approach – in which interviews are conducted to confirm the
story initially imagined by the reporter – is not compatible with the inductive techniques
of ethnography’ (p. 136). Moreover, orientation toward events signifies important differences
in the commitments of the conventional and the ethnographic reporter. Hannerz
(2004: 223) holds that, due to their preoccupation with events, reporters, opposite
266	 Journalism 17(2)
ethnographers, tend to miss the developments that are the basic factors of change. While
standard journalism probes extraordinary events – like conflicts – ethnography encircles
quotidian life (Cramer and McDevitt, 2004: 135; Singer, 2009: 194). Conover’s (2000
[2001]) book Newjack exemplifies how the everyday experiences of a corrections officer
hold exciting stories that balance descriptions of the ordinary with journalistic
sensationalism:
Perlstein [a superior prison guard] gave me a lighter and sent me down to the north-facing
gallery by myself, with instructions to light inmates’ cigarettes […] This was unexpectedly
frightening. All I knew about Box inmates [prisoners in solitary confinement] was that they
were very, very bad. I thought of agent Clarice Starling approaching Hannibal Lecter’s cell in
The Silence of the Lambs. Downstairs at the Box was the lowest level of hell. (p. 128)
Cultural reproduction
In a different epistemic register, journalism tends to rest upon, and indeed reproduce,
‘cultural values’ and ‘institutional memories’ instated in the archives by professional
predecessors (Hannerz, 2004: 217; Singer, 2009: 193). In popular journalism, commonsense
constitutes a reference point rather than an ethos to be examined. Such epistemic
entrapment makes the press inattentive to forms of knowledge circulating outside its core
channels, reinforcing the concerns and prejudices of the average audience (Boyer, 2010:
9; Grindal and Rhodes, 1987: 13). Whereas journalism’s emphasis on balance enforces
dominant ideologies by defining the limits of acceptable public discourse, ‘responsible
reporting’, or reporting ‘at the grass roots’, represents marginalized groups and recognizes
divergent values in attempt to counter commonplace assumptions (Cramer and
McDevitt, 2004: 130; Harrington, 2003: 92). Conover (2014) attempts to avoid the
received wisdoms of public discourse:
There can be disadvantages to doing too much research ahead of time. The main disadvantage,
I think, is that you uncritically absorb a standard approach to something, which amounts to a set
of blinders, which keeps you from considering other interpretations that you might develop
based purely on your own experience. So there’s some kind of tension there between ignorance
and inculcation in a common wisdom or set of approaches. You don’t want to be at either pole
of that scale. You need to find a comfort zone in the middle.
Finding this middle of the scale, however, seems to constitute the balancing of, on one
hand, overriding commonsense with, on the other hand, the journalistic concern for originality.
According to Conover (2014), it is of utmost importance to be aware of accounts
that may resemble his work: ‘If Truman Capote [acclaimed author of the 1966 non-fiction
crime story In Cold Blood] worked as a prison guard, I’ve better have read his article’.
We see this same normative negotiation in Harrington’s (2003) contemplation of
what it means to add a prefix like ‘ethnography’ to journalism:
When you add the word literary to journalism or documentary or ethnography, you cross a line.
You are no longer attempting to only describe other people’s experiences. You are now taking
responsibility for describing them through your own sense of those other people’s experiences.
Hermann	 267
The egoist in us emerges because we now take pride in the way we tell a story, in the cleverness
of our inquiry, the uniqueness of our insight. (pp. 102–103)
Evidently, Harrington links this epistemic responsibility with artistic originality, that is,
commercial value. However, his distinction between conventional and ethnographic journalistic
descriptions resembles the distinctions between first- and second-order observations
in social sciences. Ethnography and journalism share the problem of representation
concerning accounts of events and people, which are ultimately outsiders’interpretations.
Ethnographic journalism provides diversity in journalistic values by abandoning routine
reliance on official sources and ideological elites (Cramer and McDevitt, 2004: 131–132).
Yet, in anthropology, the ‘crisis of representation’ concerns not so much cultural bias in
the choice of interlocutors but, more importantly, taking control of interlocutors’ experiences
in autonomous accounts conditioned by the ethnographer’s interpretive instruments.
Arguably, the ‘reflexive turn’ in anthropology sought to make up for the fact that ethnographers
cannot truly account for the ‘native’s point of view’ but at best provide secondorder
observation permeated by their own position. Harrington (2003) describes the ‘hard
challenges’for journalism of ‘knowing what people mean when they say things, knowing
what their gestures and expressions mean, knowing what the objects they have arrayed
around them in their homes mean to them’ (p. 92). This implies that the journalist must
speak on behalf of interlocutors from a vantage point, which contradicts the precautious
approach to textual authority in contemporary anthropology. Nevertheless, a move toward
ethnographic accounts modifies the press’ reproduction of ‘cultural values’ by dodging
‘inculcation in a common wisdom’. Consequently, such a move changes journalism’s
concurrent transformation and continuation of the world, that is, its poïesis.
Strategic level
In dialog with the epistemic register of reporters are their practical performances, that is,
the methods they employ to serve perceived professional purposes. Just as journalism’s
ideals guide its reporting processes, its ‘reals’ impact its ideology: strategic choices or
sensibilities during reporting delineate and direct the attention as outlined above.
Out of angle
This is evident from the limited scope of most journalistic accounts. Although ethnographic
fieldwork and journalistic reporting are based on similar techniques of being
present and interviewing people, the ethnographic approach is essentially open-ended.
Conversely, as mentioned, journalists operate with ‘angles’ for focusing research and
structuring narratives (Bird, 2005; Cramer and McDevitt, 2004; Hannerz, 2004). In addition
to the epistemological implications of such a priori determined attention, this produces
a linear rather than a dialectical relationship between data and analysis (Bird,
2005: 304, 204). Journalists like Conover and Harrington, however, seemingly negotiate
such concerns strategically. While operating with ethnographically informed immersion
strategies, they pay attention to ‘theme’, ‘story’, and ‘angle’. Harrington (2003: 92–94)
offers nine defining characteristics, according to which ‘journalistic anthropologists’ (1)
268	 Journalism 17(2)
immerse themselves in the life of their subjects, (2) let action unfold naturally, (3) collect
material through all their senses, (4) interview for deeper meaning, (5) watch for a ‘contemporary
action line’ that will make the story dramatically coherent, (6) collect overheard
dialog, (7) report for telling status details, (8) note gestures and bodily features to
render the subject physically, and (9) watch for small events and details that evoke their
stories’ themes.
Consequently, specific ethnographic data (details, gestures, small events, bodily features)
are extracted purposefully to ‘evoke’ the theme of the (a priori envisioned) story
rather than data deciding the story in the first place. This underscores Bird’s point that
journalists tend to ‘know’the story prior to research. Conover (2014) exhibits the tension
between inductive research and project management:
As much as possible, I try to avoid being on a fishing expedition. In my book about roads [The
Routes of Man, 2010], I wanted to write about the West Bank. I didn’t just check into a hotel in
Jerusalem and begin my research – that could take a very long time. I tried to find situations to
investigate before I landed so when I did get to Jerusalem I already knew some Palestinian
students who said they’d show me around and I already and established that the Israeli military
wouldletmespendtimeonabase.NewthingsthenappearedonceI’destablishedthatgroundwork.
On one hand, Conover expresses the ‘challenge’of non-fiction: the inability to control
events. On the other hand, we see how some practical concerns of journalism – like time
– demand some level of predetermination. This relates to the ‘straightjacketing’ effects
that time has on journalism as identified by Schudson (1986: 104). But evidently, the
straightjacket is much looser in Conover’s reporting compared to conventional news.
What does, however, seem to set some a priori limits is his reporting technique. In other
words, the use of ethnographic methods is a motor for his choice of topic. Telling me
about his recent reporting for Harper’s where he worked as federal meat inspector,
Conover (2014) explained how the likelihood of a good outcome increases if he can
participate in the phenomenon he studies:
Obviously, in addition, there’s a series of things I’m going to be alert to, themes I would like to
examine, like the production of food or the treatment of animals, questions of purity and worker
health and all those things. But the big piece is the opportunity to participate because that has
the promise of a glimpse behind the curtain and, I hope, an exciting engagement with the
narrator as he is faced with difficulty.
This approach to ethnographic reportage exhibits a balancing of conventional journalistic
practices with ethnographic considerations by which journalistic norms are recast.
The role of the researcher
Naturally, the role of a journalist – his or her function, attitude, ethics, and relation to
sources – determines the outcome of any reporting. Generally, the antithesis between the
objective, event-driven sentiment of journalism and the interpretive, holistic approach of
ethnographic inquiry is illuminated by two distinct disciplinary approaches to the field.
The use of ethnography in journalism transforms the journalistic interview from an
Hermann	 269
extraction of specific information into a conception of the ‘lived world’ of interviewees
(Cramer and McDevitt, 2004: 136). The attitude to sources is similarly challenged. While
the journalist’s primary responsibility is to serve the public, ethnographers’ primary
responsibility is to protect informants (Singer, 2009: 192–194). In conventional Western
journalism, the observer (journalist) posits a formal distance between himself or herself
and the participant (stakeholder/source) in the mediation of information (Singer, 2009).
But similar to how quantitative methods from social science were a hallmark of precision
journalism, the dominant defining character of ethnographic journalism is its adoption
of qualitative methods, predominantly immersion strategies like
participant-observation that blur these lines (Bird, 1987: 5; Boynton, 2005: xv; Cramer
and McDevitt, 2004: 127–128; Harrington, 2003: 92; Iorio, 2004: 14–15). According to
Boynton (2005: xv), this ‘generation’ of journalists experiments with ways of getting a
story by developing immersion strategies and extending the time for reporting: ‘Reporting
on the minutiae of the ordinary – often over a period of years – has become their signature
method’. The use of immersion strategies in long-term reporting seemingly shares
the ethical commitment of the early 20th-century muckrackers like Jacob Riis conjoined
with literary gusto (Boynton, 2005: 3).
The function (narrator/partaker), attitude (skeptical/empathic), and loyalty of the
researcher (to public/subject) impact the degree of immersion and, hence, the very ability
of the researcher to produce the ethnographic insider’s perspective. Consequently, the
journalist cannot remain a detached observer and narrator, but must become an immersed
partaker. Thus, similar to public journalism, the participatory role inhabited by ethnographic
journalists significantly affects the genre’s overall ideology. Moreover, due to
the open-ended nature of the inquiry itself, informants cannot be merely ‘token symbols
of the people’ illustrating a story that has been determined a priori (Bird, 2005: 304).
Ethnographic reporters must transcend ‘not only professional conventions and reporting
habits but also their own demographic profiles’ by exchanging the traditional skeptical
attitude with an empathetic one (Cramer and McDevitt, 2004).
Such purposeful adoption of what anthropologists call a ‘native point-of-view’, that
is, an insider’s perspective, is evident in Conover’s work. For instance, he describes his
growing sympathy for the prison guard brutality due to his participatory reporting:
A dozen of us marched purposefully downstairs to the Box. There was action ahead, and I felt
suddenly excited to have been included. Despite the ominous tone, and my better instincts, I’d
countenanced enough inmate misbehavior and disrespect to feel invigorated by the thought that
this is where it all stops. This is where we draw the line. (Conover, 2000 [2001]: 131)
In one of my conversations with him, Conover recalled his growing assimilation with
Sing Sing prison guards while reporting Newjack:
I started saying ‘we’ in about my fourth month of work in the prison. I would say we did this
today, we did that today, we don’t like it when that happens. I had begun to identify with
[corrections officers] as a group even though I’m quite clear that I’m a writer and I take notes
everyday on what I’m doing. But I think you can belong to more than one group at a time.
(Conover, 2014)
270	 Journalism 17(2)
In sum, ethnographic journalists must adjust their role as reporters by immersing
themselves as participants in a community to which they are empathetic. This supplants
the adversarial norm of mainstream journalism.
Omitting immediacy
Both immersion itself and holistic research take time. Indeed, ethnography is often
deliberately slow (Marcus, 2003). On the contrary, relevance, timeliness, and, hence,
swiftness are closely linked in journalism (Bird, 2010; Boyer, 2010: 6; Schudson,
1986; Singer, 2009: 193). According to Hannerz (2004: 208), news, generally, is a
management of temporality on two separate levels. Due to the urgent fact of deadlines,
time impacts the practical mode of production. Second, there is an implied
temporality in any journalistic product. These two types of temporality are matters of
regimentation and representation, respectively (Hannerz, 2004: 209, 213). Hannerz
(2004: 220) argues that, in competing news, urgency trumps the agenda. Thus, attaching
a story to an immediate event can heighten its value as a commodity. This corresponds
with Schudson’s (1986: 80–81, 108) analysis of ‘news pegs’ and his critique
of journalism’s ‘fetishism of the present’. While Schudson (1986) distinguishes the
‘timeliness’ of hard news to the ‘timelessness’ of features, he asserts that ‘[j]ournalists
can do little with what is unchanging, continuous, because they are tied, sometimes
straitjacketed, to the conventions of the “news peg”’ (p. 104). Observing German
journalists, Boyer (2005: 255) similarly identifies a relationship between time pressures,
‘cold’ objectivity, and the reproduction of predetermined narratives in news
journalism.
Ethnographic immersion, conversely, requires a prolonged period of inquiry.
Actually, the temporal dimension itself regulates the degree to which immersion can be
said to take place. Nevertheless, temporal differences ‘do not invalidate basic overlaps
between journalistic and ethnographic modes of translocal expertise and communication’
(Boyer, 2010: 6). The temporal conditions, according to Bird (2005: 304), are not
intrinsic to journalism but transcendable in an ethnographically informed practice. As
Boynton (2005: xii–xv, 19–20) stresses, immersion journalism extends reporting time.
In Conover’s work, we see how, on one hand, he usually spends months or even a whole
year immersed in a community. Yet, he tends to include news pegs, making his ethnographic
endeavor journalistically justifiable: ‘All of this seemed urgent because of what
can be called America’s incarceration crisis’ (Conover, 2000 [2001]: 19). As such,
‘urgency’ becomes a vehicle for the ethnographic journalist to immerse himself into
‘prison culture’ for an entire year, bridging temporal aspects of journalism and
ethnography.
Stylistic level
Finally, two literary issues, distinguishing conventional journalistic prose from that of
ethnography, must be negotiated: the presentation and arrangement of data and the use of
technical terminology.
Hermann	 271
Accessible prose
According to Singer (2009), ‘ethnography is both a process and a product, the writing
is an integral component, a method of inquiry into author as well as topic’ (p. 192). This
underscores the dialectic process of ethnography, but a similar fluid boundary between
reporting (data collection) and writing (data mediation) is identified in Harrington’s
(2003) description of ‘documentary literary journalism’ or ‘journalistic anthropology’.
However, Harrington (2003) stresses, ‘[i]t is necessary to first ‘see’ the finished stories
in your head […] so you know what you must report to have what you need to build a
particular story’ (p. 97). In other words, imagining the final prose precedes reporting
which, in turn, precedes the writing process. Reversing the process in Figure 1, this is a
somewhat opposite dialecticism from the one Singer and Bird have described. How
such an approach is compatible with the prerogative to ‘override’ commonsense, in
Harrington’s own words, remains unclear. Similarly unclear is Cramer and McDevitt’s
(2004: 137) position that, through ethnography, the journalist must let the subjects be
the true narrators of the story, reducing the reporter to merely a medium. This, obviously,
collides with the explanatory and interpretative power of an ethnographic journalism,
as outlined above – a paradox unaddressed in Cramer and McDevitt’s pioneer
manual to ethnographic reporting.
However, Harrington (2003: 96–97) contrasts academic jargon to journalism’s commitment
to plain and precise language, its active rather than passive voice, and vigilance
as to words and grammar. This can be interpreted as both a commercial and a democratic
concern for the literary quality, hence accessibility of the product. Jargon, as
coded and excluding language, may obstruct ‘the linguistic preconditions for deeper
democracy’ (Miller, 2000), i.e. enable public deliberation through the press. On the
other hand, precise writing might inhibit careful representation. Again, ethnographic
journalists are obliged to negotiate the dual risk of excluding the general public and
hegemonizing their sources. These tensions extend to the composition of the narrative.
Entertaining compositions
As we have seen, in the medley of ethnography and journalism, immersion is employed,
at least partly, in order to entertain readers. Harrington (2003) holds, ‘[w]e pander to the
needs of “story”. We do that because we are also entertainers’ (p. 101). This corresponds
with his view that journalists should make the story dramatically coherent by looking for
‘action lines’ during reporting. It also corresponds with Conover’s (2014) reasoning for
his decision to immerse himself:
Originality is an important element of storytelling. It’s true that, in certain ways, as a culture we
tell the same stories over and over again. Nevertheless, if you’re setting out to write about
prison, you have to think about what can I say that’s new, what can I learn that isn’t already
known? What approach would be unusual or unique? And that’s the question that let me to
think oh! Maybe I can learn about prison from the perspective of guards. Maybe that sort of
counter-intuitive approach could be effective because they’re so reflexively dismissed as the
enemy by most people who care about prison and I thought that would be interesting to examine.
And I think in a lot of ways, it’s not the employees in a prison who are a problem it’s society
that created this institution that forces certain people to act in certain ways.
272	 Journalism 17(2)
For Conover, participant-observation is a means to a good story, which he equates
with a good narrative. Thus, his methodology is driven by stylistic, rather than epistemic,
concerns. Nevertheless, he conflates artistic uniqueness and objection to commonsense
assumptions in mainstream media, negotiating traditional journalistic
concerns with those of ethnography. Furthermore, while using ethnographic methods,
he operates with parameters like conflict and change similar to those of conventional
journalism:
Trouble is one of the great drives of narrative. I’m always looking for problems, for things
going wrong, for people facing a challenge and negotiating it. Readers relate to individual
people so I look for individual people who I treat as characters who solve problems or run into
difficulties either alone or with each other or occasionally with me. And with the passage of
time, we see the situation change. (Conover, 2014)
Such stylistic concerns have epistemic implications that are at odds with ethnographic
concerns for community, continuity, and the quotidian as stressed by Cramer
and McDevitt, Hannerz, and Singer. In ethnographic journalism, these methodological
and epistemological prerogatives are negotiated with the need to gain readership.
Journalism’s micro-mechanisms
As this analysis suggests, condensing previous approaches to ethnographic journalism
proves difficult because they are predominantly normative, and not empirical, because
observers come out of different disciplines, and because there is no fundamental agreement
as to what constitutes ethnography, let alone journalism (Zelizer, 2004: 23). Still, we
see how employing ethnography impacts several registers of journalism on the epistemic
as well as the strategic and the stylistic level. These registers, or micro-mechanisms, are
outlined in Table 1, which provides a schema for comparing journalism practices holistically.
As for ethnographic journalism, interpretation and immersion seem to be its essential
features. Generally, ethnography appears to be employed journalistically out of
strategic or stylistic concerns. In academia, methodology is determined by the nature of
the inquiry, that is, questions operating on the epistemic level. In journalism, however,
ethnography is imagined as a profoundly strategic device employed to produce fascinatingly
unique content. Meanwhile, these practices, by necessity, supplant some epistemic
tendencies of conventional journalism, most importantly objectivity and the unreflective
reproduction of hegemonic beliefs.
From the analyses above, we can extract several signifiers, making a given account
more journalistic or more ethnographic in terms of ideal types. Ethnographic journalism
appears to move between these poles that, in reality, constitute continuums rather than
dichotomies. As illustrated in Table 1, an ethnographic journalism operates on the epistemic
level affecting the journalistic position, altering the norm of objectivity in favor of
an interpretive approach, similar to other journalisms like MacDougall’s interpretive journalism.
Furthermore, the journalistic commitment, that is, focus, goals, and interests,
moves from an event-driven preoccupation with conflict and rupture toward a holistic
engagement with continuity and social structures similar to, for instance, precision journalism.
And rather than cultural reproduction, taking previous media frames as
Hermann	 273
the starting point and replicating them through linear research, journalism can counter
commonsense by informing its inquiry theoretically and making it dialectic. This may
alter the poïesis of the press, i.e. the structuring labor of its basic assumptions.
On the strategic level, an ethnographic journalism broadens the scope of inquiry by
catering to context and balancing an angled approach with a more flexible focus. The
role of reporters – their relationship to the issue at hand, their sense of responsibility, and
their attitude – changes from a detached, skeptical narrator to an immersed and empathetic
observer, similar to, for instance, intimate journalism and public journalism.
Similarly, the temporal scope of research, with the infusion of ethnography, signifies a
long-term rather than a prompt project.
On the stylistic level, the ethnographic journalist must negotiate a concern for literary
quality, accessibility, and entertainment, similar to genres like literary and new journalism,
with complex and precise representation of ethnographic evidence. Similarly, the
composition of the text has to negotiate the dramatic narratives of journalism with the
systematic form of ethnography.
Although the employment of immersion strategies is a dominant characteristic of ethnographic
journalism, it seems stimulated by strategies for ‘getting the story’ (Peterson,
Table 1.  Epistemic, strategic, and stylistic micro-mechanisms of journalism and ethnography as
ideal types.
Level Issue Impulse
Epistemic Journalistic Ethnographic
Position Objective Interpretive
  Facts Meaning
  Commitment Event-driven Holistic
  Conflict/change Continuity
  Poïesis Cultural reproduction Countering commonsense
  Archive Theory
Strategic Scope Angle Context
  Fixed focus Flexible focus
  Linear Dialectic
  Role Narrator Partaker
  Detached Immersed
  Skeptical Empathetic
  Loyal to public Loyal to interlocutors
  Temporality Short term Long term
  Limited inquiry Open-ended inquiry
Stylistic Prose Structuring data Structured by data
  Entertaining Informing
  Language Accessible Jargon
  Inclusive Exclusive
  Plain Complex
  Narrative Dramatic Systematic
274	 Journalism 17(2)
2010) rather than by idealistic or epistemic concerns for the extraction of adequate and
accurate data. This is in keeping with journalism research describing ‘story ideation’ and
‘news philosophy’ as decisively market-driven (Becker and Vlad, 2009: 66). However,
the ethnographic method itself appears to guide story ideation as well. This corresponds
to Pedelty’s (2010) claim that ethnographic journalists maintain a double ambition ‘both
recognizing the exigencies of the market and attempting to expand space for critical
inquiry’. Such ambitions make ethnographic journalism distinct from previous innovative
genres. It resembles precision journalism in its employment of academic methods,
but utilizes the inherent overlaps between qualitative methods and journalistic craftsmanship
rather than focusing on statistics. New journalism and public journalism
emerged from concerns with literary quality and representation, respectively. The present
analysis suggests that ethnographic journalism has profound affinities with both
these genres in terms of public inclusion and expressive distinctiveness. This corresponds
to observations by Emmanuelle Gatien who identifies ethnographic journalism as an
emerging standard of excellence in French journalism.
Boynton (2005) describes a New New Journalism, including the work of reporters like
Conover, Leon Dash, and Alex Kotlowich, as a practice applying the form of new journalism
to the social and political concerns of turn-of-the-century journalists like Jacob
Riis, who dedicated his work to better the living conditions for impoverished New
Yorkers. But while these norms are evident in ethnographic journalism, they appear to be
dependent upon the introduction of particular methods. Ethnographic journalism seems
to emerge from the space in-between epistemology and style, that is, methodology: the
usefulness of immersion strategies themselves. Consequently, ethnographic journalism
signifies the employment of immersion strategies for publication purposes. These strategies,
however, propel the progression of journalistic epistemology toward critical scholarship
disposing, to some extent, of norms of mainstream journalism that have been
heavily critiqued in journalistic scholarship, like objectivity.
The remaining question is how to distinguish ethnographic journalism. What defines
it appears to be the blurring of the impulses outlined above creating divergent and
dynamic hybrids. As none of these signifiers appear exclusive to or decisive for an ethnographic
journalism, producing an accurate taxonomy proves difficult. Yet, we may
simply appreciate that the slippage between genres offers sites for examining journalism’s
ongoing normative negotiations.
Cultural diversity and contextual reporting
We might also contemplate what kind of journalistic stage ethnographic journalism as a
‘hot moment’ reflects. At least two separate circumstances seem to speak to the vocalization
of an ethnographic genre in journalism: the rise of multiculturalism and ‘contextualized
reporting’, respectively. According to Fink and Schudson (2014: 7), the second half
of 20th century brought a decrease in conventional, ‘just the facts’ journalism and a vast
increase in ‘contextual reporting’. Analyzing 1891 articles, they document how, in 2005,
contextual reporting accounted for close to half of all stories. Noting the essential place of
‘social empathy stories’in this trend, Fink and Schudson (2014) describe the replacement
of conventional, adversarial reporting by ‘a more intellectually ambitious journalism. It is
Hermann	 275
a more “featurized” journalism with front-page stories of a contextual cast’ (p. 15). Such
a trend divulges the need for reporting strategies that integrate descriptive and interpretative
registers.
The same can be said for a challenge coming from more general social structures.
Multiculturalism, while a predicate for specific ideologies, is also a descriptive term for the
fact of cultural diversity in a society. News evolves in moments of breaches in commonsense
and ‘[t]his use of pre-existing cultural frames will inevitably tend toward cultural
reproduction’ (Peterson, 2001: 203, 207–208). ‘Objective facts’ in journalism are, in fact,
determined by dominant commonsense (Deuze, 2005: 453; Peterson, 2001: 201, 209:
Tuchman, 1972: 674). So while objective reporting may have been less problematic in
times of strong cultural and social cohesion, it is poorly suited to account for precisely the
cultural differences that a responsible, representative press can be expected to engage with:
[O]ne can be content with ‘giving the facts’ where there are generally accepted rules for
interpreting the facts and an agreed set of political values and purposes. Today no accepted
system for interpretation exists and political values and purposes are very much in contention.
(Carey, 1997b: 139–140)
Such diversity, according to Deuze (2005: 454), forces practitioners to face objectivity
and rethink it. Multiculturalism challenges perceptions of the role and function of
journalism as a whole, forcing journalism to continuously reinvent itself (Deuze, 2005:
447, 453). Ethnographic reporting seems be one such response since it profoundly disturbs
the objectivity paradigm otherwise identified with journalism. As evident from the
analysis above, cultural, as well as subcultural, sensitivity emerges from specific reporting
strategies. In turn, such techniques can destabilize hegemonizing and marginalizing
effects of the press (Sewell, 1999: 56).
But while these social changes challenge established norms and values of journalists,
journalistic responses challenge our assumptions, as media scholars, about journalism
itself. They exhibit journalism as not a coherent ideology but a socially structured interpretive
practice (Peterson, 2001). We may imagine journalism holistically as processes
of cognition, a concept that conjoins attention, memory, reasoning, producing and understanding
language, learning, problem solving, and decision-making. If we think of journalism
as cognition, we see how it constitutes a faculty for processing information,
applying knowledge, and changing preferences, within the profession and within society
at large. Deuze (2005) stresses, ‘[i]t is by studying how journalists from all walks of their
professional life negotiate the core values that one can see the occupational ideology of
journalism at work’ (p. 458). Ethnographic journalism as one professional path is, evidently,
a window into such negotiations.
Conclusion
This article sought to account for ‘ethnographic journalism’ as a critical incident that
negotiates the normative boundaries of journalistic practices. While journalism has long
shared a kinship with ethnography, this relationship is now explicitly aired. In challenging
epistemic, strategic, and stylistic registers of conventional journalism, ethnographic
276	 Journalism 17(2)
journalism holds a critique of traditional journalistic objectivity, assumptions, detachment,
and scope – if not for the sake of compassion and inclusion, then as a means of
originality in the service of storytelling and, subsequently, readership. Based on the
analyses of fragmented approaches to this genre, ethnographic journalism can be –
albeit loosely – defined as the employment of immersion strategies adopted from social
sciences for literary and ultimately commercial purposes. These stylistic and strategic
practices, however, propel the transgression of conventional journalistic epistemology
toward critical scholarship. This should not be surprising if we consider Bourdieu’s
concept of habitus.
The scope of this practice remains an important question for future research and is
beyond the limits of this article, which has aimed to provide a platform for further empirical
studies. Such research is critical since this genre corresponds with or responds to
contemporary challenges and changes in journalism at large – predominantly the lack of
cultural and social cohesion and the rise of contextual reporting. While offering one
approach to an ‘intellectually ambitious’ journalism, the genre accounts for precisely the
cultural differences that ‘responsible reporting’, historically, was imagined to mediate, if
not mitigate. Furthermore, ethnographic journalism constitutes a challenge not only to
naturalized journalistic conventions but also to the scholarly conception of journalism as
a coherent professional ideology. Rather, we may contemplate contemporary journalisms
as divergent processes of cognition, which themselves are made up of changing philosophical,
practical, and expressional parts.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Michael Schudson and Peter Bro for their insightful and helpful
comments.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.
References
Becker LB and Vlad T (2009) News organizations and routines. In: Wahl-Jorgensen K and
Hanitzsch T (eds) The Handbook of Journalism Studies. New York: Routledge, pp. 59–72.
Bird SE (1987) Anthropological methods relevant for journalists. Journalism Educator 41: 5–10,
33.
Bird SE (2005) The journalist as ethnographer? How anthropology can enrich journalistic practice.
In: Rothenbuhler EW and Coman M (eds) Media Anthropology. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE
Publications, pp. 301–308.
Bird SE (2010) Anthropological engagement with news media. Anthropology News 51(4): 5–9.
Bourdieu P (1977) Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Boyer D (2005) The corporality of expertise. Ethnos 70(2): 243–266.
Hermann	 277
Boyer D (2010) Divergent temporalities: On the division of labor between journalism and anthropology.
Anthropology News 51(4): 6–9.
Boynton R (2005) The New Journalism: Conversations with America’s Best Nonfiction Writers on
Their Craft. New York: Vintage.
Carey JW (1986) Why and how? The dark continent of American journalism. In: Manoff RK and
Schudson M (eds) Reading the News: A Pantheon Guide to Popular Culture. New York:
Pantheon Books, pp. 146–196.
Carey JW (1997a) Afterword: The culture in question. In: Munson ES and Warren CA (eds.) James
Carey: A Critical Reader. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 308–340.
Carey JW (1997b) The communications of revolution and the professional communicator. In:
Munson ES and Warren CA (eds.) James Carey: A Critical Reader. Minneapolis, MN:
University of Minnesota Press, pp. 128–143.
Clifford J and Marcus GE (1986) Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography.
Berkeley, CA; Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press.
Commission of the Freedom of the Press (1947) A Free and Responsible Press. Chicago, IL: The
University of Chicago Press.
Conover T (2014) On ethnographic journalism [Interview], 25 June 2014.
Conover T (2010) The Routes of Man: How Roads Are Changing the World and the Way We Live
Today. New York: Knopf.
Conover T (2000 [2001]) Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing. New York: Vintage Books.
Cramer JM and McDevitt M (2004) Ethnographic journalism. In: Iorio SH (ed.) Qualitative
Research in Journalism: Taking it to the streets. New York and London: Routledge, pp.
127–143.
Deuze M (2005) What is journalism?: Professional identity and ideology of journalists reconsidered.
Journalism 6(4): 442–464.
Fillmore R (1987) Anthro-journalism. In: Communicating Anthropology. Available at: http://
www.sciencesitescom.com/CASC/ajrf.html (3 December 2012).
Fink K and Schudson M (2014) The rise of contextual journalism, 1950s–2000s. Journalism 15:
3–20.
Foucault M (1970 [1994]) The Order of Things: Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York:
Vintage.
Gans HJ (2010) Public ethnography; Ethnography as public sociology. Qualitative Sociology
33(1): 99.
Geertz C (1973) The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books.
Glasser TL (ed.) (1999) The Idea of Public Journalism. New York: The Guilford Press.
Grindal BT and Rhodes R (1987) Journalism and anthropology share several similarities.
Journalism Educator 41: 4–5, 11, 33.
Hannerz U (2004) Foreign News: Exploring the world of foreign correspondents. Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press.
Harcup T (2004) Journalism: Principles and Practice. London: SAGE Publications.
Harrington W (1997) Intimate Journalism: The Art and Craft of Reporting Everyday Life. London:
SAGE Publications.
Harrington W (2003) What journalism can offer ethnography. Qualitative Inquiry 9(1): 90–104.
Iorio SH (2004) Qualitative method journalism. In: Iorio SH (ed.) Qualitative Research in
Journalism: Taking it to the streets. New York and London: Routledge, pp. 3–19.
Lindner R (1990 [1996]) The Reportage of Urban Culture: Robert Park and the Chicago School.
New York: Cambridge University Press.
MacDougall CD (1938) Interpretive Reporting. New York: The Macmillan Company.
278	 Journalism 17(2)
Marcus GE (2003) On the unbearable slowness of being an anthropologist now: Notes on a contemporary
anxiety in the making of ethnography. XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics 12: 7–20.
Meyer P (1973 [2002]) Precision Journalism: A Reporter’s Introduction to Social Science
Methods. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
Miller J (2000) Is bad writing necessary? George Orwell, Theodor Adorno, and the politics of
literature. Lingua Franca 9(9). Available at: http://linguafranca.mirror.theinfo.org/9912/writing.html
(18 November 2014).
Pedelty M (2010) Teaching ethnographic journalism: Critical comparison, productive conundrums.
Anthropology News 51(4): 25–26.
Peterson MA (2001) Getting to the story: Unwritable discourse and interpretive practice in
American journalism. Anthropological Quarterly 74(4): 201–211.
Peterson MA (2010) Journalism as trope. Anthropology News 51(4): 8–9.
Schudson M (1986) WHEN? Deadlines, datelines, and history. In: Manoff RK and Schudson M
(eds) Reading the News: A Pantheon Guide to Popular Culture. New York: Pantheon Books,
pp. 79–108.
Sefcovic EMI (1995) Toward a conception of ‘Gonzo’ ethnography. Journal of Communication
Inquiry 19(20): 20–37.
Sewell W (1999) The concept(s) of culture. In: Bonnell VE and Hunt L (eds) Beyond the Cultural
Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture. Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, pp. 52–58.
Sims N and Kramer M (1995) Literary Journalism. New York: Ballantine Books.
Singer JB (2009) Ethnography. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 86(1): 191–198.
Skinner D, Gasher MJ and Compton J (2001) Putting theory to practice: A critical approach to
journalism studies. Journalism 2(3): 341–360.
Tuchman G (1972) Objectivity as strategic ritual: An examination of newsmen’s notions of objectivity.
American Journal of Sociology 77(4): 660–679.
Ward S (2009) Truth and objectivity. In: Wilkins L and Christians CG (eds) The Handbook of
Mass Media Ethics. New York: Routledge, pp. 71–83.
Weber M (1949) The Methodology of the Social Sciences. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.
Wolfe T (1973) The New Journalism. New York: Harper and Row.
Zelizer B (1992) CNN, the Gulf War, and journalistic practice. Journal of Communication 42(1):
66–81.
Zelizer B (2004) Taking Journalism Seriously: News and the Academy. Thousand Oaks, CA;
London; New Delhi, India: SAGE Publications.
Author biography
Anne Kirstine Hermann is a PhD Fellow at the Center for Journalism, the University of Southern
Denmark. Previously, she worked as a foreign correspondent for Danish media and was a Fulbright
Scholar at The New School for Social Research in New York where she gained an MA in
anthropology.