Journalism, Practice and … Poetry

This article examines the role of creative writing in understanding journalism. It argues that non-academic writing—poetry in this case—can play a far more significant part in journalism research than that of an entertaining genre for disseminating a study's findings, mainly to audiences beyond academia. Not only can poetry complement traditional “academic” texts by filling the gaps of the vivid details of the situated practices of journalism as they are lived in real life. It also has far-reaching epistemological and ontological implications: it raises fundamental questions about the world where journalists operate, the role of imagination, sensory perceptions and materiality in everyday manifestations of journalism, as well as the place of the scholar in the research process. The benefits of creative writing are illustrated through examples of actual poems written while conducting a comparative study of foreign journalists in the United Kingdom, Norway and Somalia.