Week 9:

Literary Journalism:

We looked at literary journalism again this week with Joe’s presentation. This was one intense and emotional presentation! Joe decided to compare two pieces of work he wrote - a piece of news journalism to a piece of literary journalism - in order to highlight the differences between the two and the advantages and disadvantages of them. The issue covered was the Bali bombings. The piece of literary journalism that Joe wrote was really touching and brought the class to silence. It did highlight the emotional impact that literary journalism can have and thus how it can be more powerful than hearing facts and figures – like the hundreds that died on that day. Literary journalism can affect a reader/viewer far more than hearing a factual report – and this may be why we love to read literary journalism. This idea of being more affected by a piece of literary journalism about one death than by hearing the statistics of hundreds that died in the terrorist attack – was linked to people being desensitised by hearing about such tragedies every day on the news – but not always seeing the emotional impacts that this tragedies have on real people’s lives.

There are 6 essential elements to literary journalism –
Hard evidence (quotes, data etc)
Research (often for a long time)
Novelistic techniques
The writer has to have a voice (they are a part of the story)
There has to be a literary prose style (structure and words)
There has to be an underlying meaning or an argument to the piece

But – as was discussed last week – literary journalism seems like an undesirable field to get into. It can take a long time to research and it doesn’t pay well – you have to have a real passion for the story you’re writing to continue with it.

Chapter 12 - Public Interest v Privacy:

This issue is very interesting to me and it also seems that the answer to this question is different for every person and is dependent on personal morals and ethics.

In class we tried to classify what was public and what was private –

Public:
- Unrestricted public areas
- In public when a person in a position of power when on duty
- Social events
- Performances

Private:
- Home
- Car
- Workplace
- Family
- Grief/illness
- Church
- Hospital

Journalists work to reveal rather than conceal and this creates conflict with a person’s right to privacy. There are many pressures that journalists face that would drive them to invade a person’s privacy – from their employer and peers.

Normally the individual’s right to privacy will be outlined by a journalist’s union or association and their set of principles – but it can be difficult to incorporate such high standards into real journalistic practices (see again the conflict between theory and practice). “But while journalistic adherence to these principles is encouraging, it would be unrealistic to expect individual journalists to be able to carry the prime responsibility for withstanding the forces discussed earlier [from employers and peers]”. (Richards, p.195)

References:

Richards I, 2001, ‘Public Interests, Private Lives’, Tapsall S and Varley C, Journalism: Theory in Practice, Oxford University Press, New York.