You'll be older too

For those of you who still drop by this blog every once in a while (if only to ignore Laura's wake up call below :-) and who are able to read Norwegian, I would like to recommend to you: Steen's Beboerne. It is a booklength piece of feature journalism about life and death in a Norwegian rest home and about care of senior citizens in general. It makes for a fantastic break from fast news journalism, and it'll make you think about your grandparents and about your parents and your downstairs neighbours and about your own old age.

Well done, Steen.

The first chapter is available here.

New Journal on Journalism: Journalistica

The first issue of Journalistica is supposed to be out by now (...has anybody seen it?) Journalistica is a Danish journal on journalism which will be publishing research articles not on media, culture or politics, but on - journalism. This means that political, cultural and media issues will be discussed, of course, but always with a focus on their consequences for journalism. The journal accepts articles in Danish, Swedish, Norwegian as well as English. The first issue is concerned with Ethics in Journalism (it had to be, says editor).

Good riddance

Sooooo---yes, I handed in my dissertation (April 5, 2:57 pm). Please excuse me for copying-and-pasting, but here comes an English summary - for your information.

Writers Who Make a Scene. Spectacular Personal Reportage in Denmark Today as Patterned on the Work of Günter Wallraff and Hunter S. Thompson. PhD dissertation submitted to the Department of Media, Cognition and Communication: Division of Rhetoric, University of Copenhagen, Denmark ∙ April, 2006.

Through a striking and consistent rhetorical practice, the German writer and social critic Günter Wallraff (1942-) and American writer and journalist Hunter S. Thompson (USA, 1937-2005) have each established their own personal brand of written journalistic reportage, namely wallraffing (role reporting) and gonzo journalism. Both are frequently imitated by colleagues all over the world, though oftentimes in a reductive fashion which turns on the negative positioning of the writer as being simply an alternative to a staid ‘mainstream’. They present themselves as more subjective, sensitive, audacious and creative than the rest. This dissertation argues for establishing spectacular personal reportage as a subgenre based on wallraffing and gonzo as rhetorical patterns which include a common ethos based on a belief in the individual (and revealed) rhetorical agency of the reporter. Through close readings (with Leff (2003) as a major point of reference) of texts by Wallraff and Thompson alongside texts by some of their prominent Danish successors (Michael Elsborg, Allan Nagel, Mads Brügger, Jakob S. Boeskov, Morten Sabroe, Claus Beck-Nielsen, Michael Jeppesen, and Flemming Chr. Nielsen), the dissertation highlights a number of rhetorical pitfalls regarding the writer’s presentation of self and enactment of agency. Generally, however, an argument is made for recognizing this subgenre as a potential stronghold for rhetorical agency in the print media. More specifically (with reference to Sheard (1996)), the texts are read as performances of critical and mediatory epideictic work-in-progress. Each writer sets out to experimentally establish some common ground between the social situation in the field on the one hand and the rhetorical situation on the other. They seek, sometimes almost desperately, to affirm and exemplify basic standards of journalism or human interaction, in a substandard world. Typically the reporters therefore willfully challenge their own standards, by bringing themselves into tricky or even dangerous situations (cf. readings in Chapter III: Handling Weapons in Writing) where they grabble with the question of what kind of (journalistic) truths to pursue (cf. readings in Chapter IV: Handling the Truth in Writing) and finally make interaction and negotiation with other people, including the reader, the focus of concern (Chapter V: Handling Other People in Writing). The adoption and adaption of the epideitic role becomes a critical, unusually physical and precious process as rhetorical momentum must be created more or less from scratch. In some texts the quest for common ground or matters worth celebrating simply fails, and in others a rhetorically iconoclastic approach is required before any epideictic celebration can begin.
The dissertation is written in Danish as a contribution to the debate within professional journalism, journalism studies, and rhetorical studies in Scandinavia regarding the question of personal and admitted perspectives versus disguised or corporate ones and, moreover, to enable and qualify the practice of spectacular personal reporting in the Scandinavian languages in the future.

Anybody planning on going to IAMCR Conference?

Hi!

I was wondering if any of you is planning on going to the next IAMCR Conference in Egypt? I haven't decided myself yet - depends on whether I got money or not - but it would be nice to know if some others are on their way to there.

/merja

website on journalism ethics

Hello all,
and happy new year!
(This will be a busy year for me: my last year of funding, so I plan on focusing on my dissertation only. We'll see how I manage to do that... :)

Those of you who are on ECREA mailing list (see: http://www.eccr.info/ecrea/) already know this, but to inform the others:

There has been set up a website for the journalism ethics related issues - especially global journalism ethics: Journalism Ethics for the Global Citizen is the name of the site.

The aim of the website is [I quote from the site:]
"Journalism Ethics for the Global Citizen at the University of British Columbia aims to study and improve journalism standards through discussion among journalists, academics and the public. Media reform is best accomplished through informed and inclusive debate in civil society, and through public understanding of the issues that confront journalists in the 21st century."

The site might be worth checking, haven't done that yet myself though. You'll find the website here: http://www.journalismethics.ca/index.htm

***

BTW, Amsterdam was great (except the weather), a big conference with a nice, cozy athmosphere. (And I love the city!!! :) :) Although, (a confession...) I noticed that I probably attended too many conferences and courses last year for in A'dam I found it a bit difficult to concentrate on the presentations and get excited about the academic networking. Enough is enough - and now is time to stop travelling and start writing the dissertation!

Good luck with your disseration (and other) work!
Cheers,
Auli

A Happy New Year (with your text set in Courier)

It is a new year now, and I am about to finish my dissertation. I thought it might put some healthy pressure on myself to say so in public. It won't exactly be handed in within the next few weeks, but a full draft will soon be handed over to two good cops at my department that I will, of course, ask to be as bad as they can when they read through it and comment on it.

What an amazing and awkward puzzle it is to find the proper place for the points I want to make in the text and to fill in the gaps where taken-for-granted information turns out to be missing (because it is only taken for granted by me). It is a great relief however, to have the formal deadline (February 2) at close quarters. I can hand in library books that I will now definitely have no time to read, and I can delete sketchy parts of the text that I definitely won't have time to develop this time around.

Moreover, I have found some comfort in a distinction (made in a Danish book on doing PhD's) between the Courier Dissertation on the one hand and the Times (or was it Times New Roman) Dissertation on the other:

The Courier kind (which will often be set in Times anyway) is the unpolished text which presents a number of interesting and substantial results, but which is not ready to go to print. As opposed to the Times kind which is.

The main point is, that the courier kind will serve to prove whether or not the candidate has earned the title of PhD. Moreover, if the dissertation is to be published, it will probably need editing in any case, and weeks or months spent polishing the dissertation might not be worth the effort.

Well, that's all from me for now. I wonder if people are still visiting the blog every once in a while? I would love to hear how things are going in your various quarters.

A Happy New Year to all of you.

call for papers

Hello!

We at JMK have got the following message from Göteborg and I thought of sharing the info with you.

/merja


Feminist Media Studies
Call for Papers – „Commentary and Criticism‰ section

Scientific/ Biological Determinism:
Media Models of Genetics and Gender


Why is it that scientific discourse of male/female difference has become so prevalent
in media accounts of gendered behaviour, or of sexual difference in transnational
terms?

How does this scientific/evolutionist discourse produce Œauthentic‚ knowledge about
women, women‚s bodies, and women‚s behaviour that exonerate historical and
political causes of gender difference?

In the west, quality newspapers are eager to report on the latest scientific research,
while television documentaries call on celebrity scientists Steven Pinker or Richard
Dawkins to give legitimacy to their explanatory commentaries. Popular
entertainment in the form of magazine quizzes, reality television, talk shows and
lifestyle make-overs return again and again to the same message, that the reason
men and women behave as they do is Œhard wired‚ into their genes through
evolutionary selection for reproductive fitness.

Meanwhile, news coverage of the Œthird world‚ woman reveals her body as the
subject of uncontrollable fertility, malnutrition, and disease. If scientific ideologies
have been an integral part of population control campaigns in India and China, for
example, the same science diagnoses media images of the bodies of women of
African nations as victims of malnutrition and sexually transmitted diseases.

None of this is new but a return to these issues is timely given the role that scientific
and evolutionary explanations now play as a counter-discourse to religious
fundamentalism.

We invite you to submit a short essay of up to 2,000 words to the „Commentary and
Criticism‰ section of the journal Feminist Media Studies that address such questions
as:

How might feminist interventions disrupt the gendered assumptions on which these
scientific discourses are founded? Are there feminist alternatives in circulation and
how might these be promoted?

What strategic uses are there for scientific accounts of gender in the context of
resurgent religious fundamentalisms?

What features of evolutionary discourse make it attractive to media professionals? Is
it the weight of popular belief with which these theories conform? Is it the utility of a
binary model that allows for relative simplicity in the telling? Is there an economic
incentive to promote sexual differentiation in a media market structured by gender?
What relevance do evolutionary explanations have in a global context? How
widespread is the circulation and acceptance of these Western scientific discourses
of gender? How do they translate into diverse cultural and political contexts?

All contributors should follow the Harvard style of reference and guidelines for
submission of manuscripts outlined on our website. The title page of the manuscript
should contain your complete mailing address, institutional affiliation, and full
contact information including phone and fax numbers.

Submissions must be e-mailed and saved as a Word attachment to both jane.arthurs@blueyonder.co.uk
and to usha.zacharias@gmail.com.

Deadline -- January 10th 2006.

Monika Djerf-Pierre
Docent / Associate professor
Institutionen för journalistik och masskommunikation / Department of journalism and mass communication
Göteborgs universitet
Box 710
SE-405 30 Göteborg
Sweden
Tel: 46 (0)31 773 12 08
Mobil: 0708-60 62 66
Fax: 46 (0)31 773 45 54