In 1977, John C. Merrill, a mass communication scholar, found that many scholars believed that the sixties movement of new journalism is in some way related to existentialism. To find this out, a study identified six main themes of the philosophy of existentialism (as espoused by Jean-Paul Sartre) and looked for the presence of these themes in the…

The late Donald C. Stewart's assertion that "the era of the cognitive psychologists is waning; the era of the social constructionists is just beginning" drew attention to a major ontological and epistemological shift in composition studies. This shift demanded a methodology to accommodate it. Some composition researchers have considered…

The New Journalism, which uses literary techniques usually restricted to fiction, has been categorized and analyzed from a number of perspectives, but little effort has been made to delineate its intellectual and philosophical roots. The New Journalism arose from the intellectual tradition of Romanticism, as opposed to Classicism, the movement…

William Hard was a creative and prolific writer of popular magazine journalism who used a rich variety of literary styles and techniques to tell his stories. His best work, which appeared in "Everybody's Magazine" from 1907 to 1911, shows characteristics that support the suggestion that Hard be considered among those writers Tom Wolfe…

To expose a fundamental conflict in journalism between newsworthiness and objectivity (or novelty and authority) this monograph first examines the parallel between news environment and physical environment. Objectivity is defined here not as a description of the environment, but as symbols in the minds of significant publics, or…

A comparison is made between the tools of observation and research used by journalists to study society and the media, and the qualitative and clinical research tools used in the social and psychological sciences. The first part of the paper, a journalistic approach to sociology, traces the notion of the sociologist as a super-reporter using…

More than 100 decontextualized, formalistic paradigms of the narrative process are in existence, but little work has been done to apply the insights narrative theory yields to news and journalistic form. Given the journalistic assumption that facts can be presented neutrally, news professionals tend to maintain that narratives do not exist outside…