Peer reviewed work
This is a selection of the peer reviewed journal articles I have authored. Below, you will find the abstract and a link to the journals where you can find the articles in their entirety. They are accessible through most university and research libraries.
You can download my doctoral dissertation as a pdf here (10.6 MB).
ETHNOGRAPHIC JOURNALISM
PUBLISHED IN JOURNALISM: THEORY, PRACTICE AND CRITICISM, january 2016
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.
J-school ethnography
- Mending the gap between the academy and journalism training?
Published online ahead of print in journalism studies, july 28 2015
Abstract: The norms of modern journalism were shaped by the development of university-based journalism programs in the United States in the late nineteenth century. In Europe, journalism still struggles with ongoing “academicization”. Academic subjects introduced in j-schools, however, are based on either factual trivia or media studies. Thus, journalism students encounter the social sciences as either a meta-study of their future industry or as a reservoir of factual knowledge useful when covering particular beats. The research methodologies of these sciences—the very production of knowledge—are assumed irrelevant to journalists. This article suggests that one way to bridge the gap between the academy and journalism is to introduce journalism students to social science as a toolbox. Academic methods resembling reportage—like ethnography—may serve as a convenient starting point. Yet, while the practical tasks of the ethnographer and the journalist—interviewing, observing, writing, etc.—are similar, the epistemic and ethical regimes of these two disciplines often collide. In addition to a theoretical outline, this article, therefore, presents an empirical study of ethnography in journalism education. In turn, it argues that, in the new “golden age” of narrative journalism, ethnographic strategies may become essential journalistic skills.
The temporal tipping point
- Regimentation, representation and reorientation in ethnographic journalism
PUBLISHED online ahead of print IN JOURNALISM practice, november 17 2015
Abstract: “Slow journalism” is a term anthropologist and sociologists sometimes use to describe their empirical work, ethnography. To journalists and media observers, meanwhile, “slow journalism” signifies a newfound dedication to serious long-form journalism. Not surprisingly, thus, “ethnographic journalism”—a genre where reporters adopt research strategies from social science—takes “slow” to the extreme. Immersing themselves in communities for weeks, months and years, ethnographic journalists seek to gain what anthropologists call “the native's point of view”. Based on in-depth interviews with practitioners and analyses of their journalistic works, this paper offers a study of ethnographic journalism suggesting that slow time operates in at least three separate registers. First, in terms of regimentation, ethnographic journalism is mostly long-form pieces that demand time-consuming research and careful writing and editing. Second, in terms of representation, practitioners report on the quotidian rather than urgent events. Third, deceleration is an essential tool for acquiring an insider's perspective. Ethnographic journalists describe a point during reporting at which their attitudes begin to change and they start to understand how things make sense to their sources. Their accounts reveal processes of “reorientation”—an added aspect of deceleration that must be included in the debate on “slow journalism”.