CFP: Narrative Journalism Across Media: Nonfiction Ethics and Literary Aesthetics

Call for Panel Participants

Sessions Organized by the

International Association for Literary Journalism Studies

To Be Held at the Annual Meeting of the

Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication

August 3–6, 2022

Detroit, USA

Narrative Journalism Across Media:
Nonfiction Ethics and Literary Aesthetics

Digital media forms increasingly provide the canvas for the most powerful journalistic storytelling of our time. The rise of the multimedia feature and the video essay as cultural forms in the early 2010s now extends to nonfiction podcasts such as The 1619 Project, which Nicholas Quah called “a formal reimagining of what an audio essay can be.” In the process, podcasts and other emerging media that stand alone and/or expand stories across multiple platforms have reimagined what journalism can be. What characterizes the major currents in narrative journalistic storytelling in digital publishing? How has art converged with digital journalism—which “is in a permanent process of becoming” according to Deuze and Witschge (2020)—via news photography, text-based literary nonfiction, reportage illustration, the video essay, longform audio documentary, and live multimedia nonfiction events like Pop-Up Magazine? Should blockbuster podcasts Serial, S-Town, and Ira Glass’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Out Crowd be credited for inventing the aural nonfiction novel? How does literary journalism engage analysis and cultural criticism across media, frequently as a type of intellectual discourse that may include plotlines but more emphatically interprets its subjects, as in Univision’s From Migrants to Refugees? What cautionary lessons can be learned from high-profile breaches of journalistic principle in digital longform projects such as Caliphate and Dr. V’s Magical Putter?

At AEJMC’s annual convention in Detroit, IALJS will sponsor two sessions that explore the theme of “Narrative Journalism Across Media: Nonfiction Ethics and Literary Aesthetics.” Proposals are welcome on any aspect of the shifting digital terrain and its impact on the ethics and/or aesthetics of narrative journalism in contemporary and/or historical texts, publications, and industries. Contributions from the perspective of scholarship, practice, and pedagogy are welcome. Presentations about journalism outside the U.S. are highly encouraged.

Interested participants are invited to contact the IALJS/AEJMC conference coordinator David Dowling david-dowling@uiowa.edu with a title and a brief abstract (250 words) of their presentation. The deadline for abstract submissions is February 28, 2022.