Talk:Journalism genres

Old lede

Pasting here in case someone wants to salvage part of this (I'm doubtful of the first paragraph's accuracy and unsure of the relevance of the 2nd to this article, which is not the History of Journalism article)

In the last half of the 20th century, the line between straight news reporting and feature writing became blurred. Journalists and publications today experiment with different approaches to writing. Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson are some of these examples. Urban and alternative weekly newspapers go even further in blurring the distinction, and many magazines include more features than straight news.

Some television news shows experimented with alternative formats, and many TV shows that claimed to be news shows were not considered such by traditional critics, because their content and methods do not adhere to accepted journalistic standards. National Public Radio, on the other hand, is considered a good example of mixing straight news reporting, features, and combinations of the two, usually meeting standards of high quality. Other US public radio news organizations have achieved similar results. A majority of newspapers still maintain a clear distinction between news and features, as do most television and radio news organizations. Superb Owl (talk) 05:03, 6 November 2023 (UTC)

Questionable categories and suggested revisions

I'm not convinced that this article adds much understanding to the different types of journalism that exist and feel it's quite misleading. Some of the so-called genres are not really genres at all. Churnalism, for example, is a critique of written journalism and is not distinct as a genre from celebrity, local or opinion journalism, to pick three. Why is science journalism picked out yet environmental journalism is not? Is there a meaningful difference between community journalism and local journalism? If online journalism is a genre, then why is there no print journalism page? I see it's been given a C-class rating.

Looking back to the original page, it seems that there was some decent attempt made to distinguish between journalistic forms ie news, features, opinion etc, which has slowly been muddied by other contributions. But there's not really enough attention paid to the distinction between broadcast journalism and written journalism, and I think it blurs the distinction between a specialism and a genre - eg you can have a science news story or a science feature or an opinion piece about science, and there is not really anything about science journalism that makes it distinct from those styles as a genre.

Since there doesn't seem to be an obvious source for the categories and are essentially an invention of the page, my suggestion is that it should be amended to:

- Written: News, Features, Opinion, Narrative (ie narrative non-fiction or new journalism)

- Spoken: News, Interviews, Discussions, Documentaries

- Image-based: Photographic, Video

I may have forgotten something here.

It makes sense to refer in the article to specialisms such as science, entertainment, data, sport, politics, foreign/international, environmental etc since that is how newsrooms and publications are often organised, but I don't see that they qualify as genres.

Does anyone disagree? Twistedhack (talk) 12:22, 29 October 2024 (UTC)