Participant, Observer, Intern, Producer: How 70 Years of Newsroom Ethnographies Approached “Participation” and the Epistemology of Participant–Observer Orientations

After 70 years, little scholarship has systematically examined the spectrum of researcher conceptualizations and enactments of “participation” newsroom ethnographies. While the fields of Anthropology and Sociology have spent the last several decades grappling with researcher–subject relationships, our analysis shows that journalism scholars have yet to embrace their own participatory turn. Through an ethnographic content analysis of participant–observer newsroom research, the present study builds a narrative about the concept of participation and its change over time. We then propose a uniquely journalistic “turn” inspired by the shifting realities of contemporary newmaking and the need to bridge the “research—practice gap.”