Valuing subjectivity in journalism: Bias, emotions, and self-interest as tools in arts reporting

This article examines the meanings and norms surrounding subjectivity across traditional and new forms of cultural journalism. While the ideal of objectivity is key to American journalism and its development as a profession, recent scholarship and new media developments have challenged the dominance of objectivity as a professional norm. This article begins with the understanding that subjectivity is an intractable part of knowing (and reporting on) the world around us to build our understanding of different modes of subjectivity and how these animate journalistic practices. Taking arts reporting, specifically reviewing, as a case study, the analysis draws on interviews with 40 book reviewers who write for major American newspapers, including The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, and prominent blogs. Findings reveal how emotions, bias, and self-interest are salient – sometimes as vice and sometimes as virtue – across the workflow of critics writing for traditional print outlets and book blogs and that these differences can be conceptualized as different epistemic styles.

Valuing subjectivity in journalism: Bias, emotions, and self-interest as tools in arts reporting

This article examines the meanings and norms surrounding subjectivity across traditional and new forms of cultural journalism. While the ideal of objectivity is key to American journalism and its development as a profession, recent scholarship and new media developments have challenged the dominance of objectivity as a professional norm. This article begins with the understanding that subjectivity is an intractable part of knowing (and reporting on) the world around us to build our understanding of different modes of subjectivity and how these animate journalistic practices. Taking arts reporting, specifically reviewing, as a case study, the analysis draws on interviews with 40 book reviewers who write for major American newspapers, including The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, and prominent blogs. Findings reveal how emotions, bias, and self-interest are salient – sometimes as vice and sometimes as virtue – across the workflow of critics writing for traditional print outlets and book blogs and that these differences can be conceptualized as different epistemic styles.

The Black and White of Newspapers

This introductory chapter delves into the history of the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) and its Goal 2000 initiative in order to examine why ASNE members had hesitated to implement civil rights reforms in their newsroom hiring practices despite passionate advocacy by a series of ASNE leaders and the expenditure of unprecedented industry resources. It traces the ASNE's reckoning with inequality from the 1950s into the twenty-first century by first exploring the ASNE's construction of a professional norm that marginalized journalists and editors who were not white, not male, and not heterosexual; and then traces the organization's subsequent attempts to democratize newsroom hiring.

Images of Essence: Journalists’ Discourse on the Professional “Discipline of Verification”

The verification of factual accuracy is widely held as essential to journalists’ professional identity. Our rhetorical analysis of interviews with award-winning and semi-randomly selected newspaper reporters confirms this professional norm while revealing a preference for four types of image to describe verification methods. Spatial and temporal travel images paint verification as an embedded but adaptable heuristic process. Images of conflict suggest verification as a weapon and a shield against implied enemies. Journalists speak of vision both literally as the preeminent tool of verification, and figuratively as a metaphor for interpretation. Meanwhile, a fourth and seemingly predominant image—that of storytelling—functions to integrate the images of travel, battle, and observation and the different forms of professional identity that they connote. The quest for truth through storytelling likewise suggests a rich, if ambiguous, sense of good journalism as combining the instruments of fact with the craft of fiction.La vérification de l’exactitude des faits est généralement considérée comme un élément essentiel de l’identité professionnelle des journalistes. Notre analyse rhétorique d’entretiens, réalisés auprès de journalistes auteurs d’articles primés ou sélectionnés de manière semi-aléatoire, confirme cette norme professionnelle tout en révélant une préférence pour quatre types d’images textuelles pour décrire leurs méthodes de vérification. Les images liées au voyage, c’est-à-dire le déplacement dans le temps et l’espace, dépeignent la vérification comme un processus heuristique intégré mais adaptable. Celles rattachées au conflit suggèrent que la vérification puisse servir d’arme et de bouclier contre des ennemis implicites. Les journalistes évoquent la vision autant au sens propre, c’est-à-dire l’oeil comme outil prééminent de vérification, mais aussi au sens métaphorique sur le plan de l’interprétation. Une quatrième image, apparemment prédominante, celle du récit, sert à rassembler celles du voyage, du combat et de l’observation, ainsi que les différentes formes de l’identité professionnelle connotées par chacune d’entre elles. De même, la quête de vérité par le récit suggère de manière riche, quoique ambiguë, une idée du « bon » journalisme qui combine les instruments factuels et l’art de la fiction.

Nurses as Guests or Professionals in Home Health Care

The aim of this study was to explore and interpret the diverse subject of positions, or roles, that nurses construct when caring for patients in their own home. Ten interviews were analysed and interpreted using discourse analysis. The findings show that these nurses working in home care constructed two positions: `guest' and `professional'. They had to make a choice between these positions because it was impossible to be both at the same time. An ethics of care and an ethics of justice were present in these positions, both of which create diverse ethical appeals, that is, implicit demands to perform according to a guest or to a professional norm.

Hong Kong Citizens' Beliefs in Media Neutrality and Perceptions of Press Freedom: Objectivity as Self-Censorship?

Premised upon the argument that the professional norm of objectivity is intricately related to the strategic struggle for press freedom in post-handover Hong Kong, this article examines how citizens' beliefs in media neutrality——a central manifestation of objectivity——relate to their perceptions of media self-censorship and press freedom.