Conceptualizing an Ecological Approach to Ethical Literary Journalism

Abstract

Well into the twenty-first century, it has become commonplace to observe the disruptive impact technological advances have made on the media landscape. Innovations in modes of gathering, processing, and distributing the news have produced crises ranging from the breakdown of traditional business models to fears about declining quality journalism. Along with these issues has come the erosion of public trust in media institutions in general and journalism in particular, necessitating a renewed discussion about communication ethics. A number of factors complicate a discussion of ethics in this field, including a lack of certainty over who is—or who identifies as—a literary journalist; the broad range of genres the field participates in and their particular demands; and choices regarding the extent to which voice, style, subjectivity, transparency, and testimony infuse or inform practitioners’ work. This chapter addresses the complex web of relationships among practitioners, subjects, texts, and readers that gives rise to issues ranging from the ethics of belief to the ethics of advocacy.