Issue 18 (2007)

Editor's Note: Journalism and world making moments

In my original call for papers for this special issue on Narrative Journalism I suggested: “Today’s newspapers and magazines present an array of different news and feature styles that have taken journalism away from the traditional inverted pyramid approach that is still the mainstay of most journalism courses”.

This prompted one spirited email exchange with an academic who took umbrage at what she regarded as the untested assumptions in that statement. “How do you know this?” she asked. “I hope proposals tackle your assumptions as well as your topic!”

Thirty-five years after Tom Woolfe’s “New Journalism” manifesto, the idea that there might be something new happening in journalism, or that perhaps our approach to journalism education may not be new enough, still has the power to rankle.

Certainly a number of the papers gathered here provide a context for that original statement and begin to provide some research data that helps to clarify the extent of the “narrative turn” in journalism and journalism education.

-Marcus O'Donnell, Guest editor