Ethnographic methods offer unique tools for journalists to use when looking to identify upcoming stories of interest to a community.
Try these ethnographic methods the next time you’re looking for emerging community interests to cover:
1. RDE Thinking
What is it?
RDE thinking is a method for anticipating cultural change. Using this method, you evaluate conventional coverage of potential news topics using residual, dominant, emergent (RDE). This method pulls from anthropology’s study of symbols (called semiotics). Large brands employ semioticians (anthropologists that study symbols) to help determine what consumer trends lie around the corner. Journalists can use these methods to help identify emerging newsworthy topics in the communities they cover.
How it works
Culture is always evolving. So within a population, there will be three views that exist simultaneously: residual, dominant and emergent.
Residual: meanings that have been around for some time. Often out of date. Review your own reporting and your competitors’ reporting on the topic. What feels residual (the same was reported years ago)?
Dominant: The norms of the day. Familiar ideas. These will be easy to spot, as they will be the majority of coverage on a topic.
Emergent: New ways of thinking. More than new trends, these ideas are still being negotiated into the culture. Culture-shaping. Keep in mind, there can be several emerging meanings, and they can even be contradictory. Look to the fringes of the topic. Where is meaning evolving? Look for things that feel odd, things you don’t immediately understand. Don’t brush them off. Gather them as “cultural evidence.” Take photos, notes, maybe do a few quick interviews. Is there a trend emerging?
Residual
Around for some time.
Example: What does the “patient” look like in residual health reporting?
Health reporting on “patients” as sick.
Residual reporting on health issues often show patients as people who are sick, in hospital, receiving care. They are reported on for a defined timeframe in their lives: while sick before returning to being healthy.
Dominant
The norms of the day.
Example: What does the “patient” look like in dominant health reporting?
Health reporting on “patients” is more varied.
Dominant reporting includes stories that are about patients that may have chronic illnesses or not be visibly sick, such as mental illness and addictions.
Emergent
New ways of thinking.
Example: What does/could the “patient” look like in emergent health reporting?
Emergent reporting on “patients” includes people who have been told there is a possibility of becoming ill. One example is people with the BRCA1 gene for breast cancer who may opt for preventive mastectomies. These are not cancer “patients” per se, but instead a new emergent group in cancer patienthood. Here, the cultural meaning of “patient” is being reshaped.1
What else is shifting? Working from the example above: If what being “sick” looks like changes, how are businesses changing what “sick days” can be used for? How are services for “patients” changing (e.x.: the marketing of mastectomy bras)? Will doctors begin asking about family medical histories of intercepted cancers? What support structures are emerging for these new types of cancer “patients”?
As you explore emerging ways of thinking on a topic, ask sources things like:
- What is shifting here (shifting away from/towards)?
- What norms is this topic drawing from?
- What norms is it rebelling against?
- How is this topic being repositioned?
- How is this topic distinctive from (mention residual ideas)?
- How is it distinctive from (mention dominant ideas)?
- What’s global about this?
- What’s local or nuanced?
An authentic emergent topic usually includes many of these ideas.
Once you identify the emergent, think about future applications in the culture. How could this play out? Ask sources where they see it going. Determining the emergent will also require knowing what new sources to speak to. See <methods for finding sources> for more.
2. View society as a process (& know media’s role within it)
What is it?
Viewing society as a process is one way to help see the story around the corner. If you can approximate where a community is in the process; then you can hypothesize what will come next.
Anticipating story arc is nothing new in journalism. When crisis happens in a society many media outlets follow a script, which includes: Projecting the next steps; and reifying populist sentiment.
Crisis too tends to follow a pattern across cultures and has been studied by anthropologists. Anthropologist Victor Turner termed the social process of crisis “social drama.”
“Social drama—conceived as a cultural construct—is embedded in the micro context of news production”2. So, although you can use social drama to predict the “next” story in a crisis, to find truly “new” stories, you’ll need to be aware of the media’s ritualistic reporting of crisis.
Understanding social drama and the media’s role within it will:
a) Allow you to know what stories will come next;
b) Give insight to what your media counterparts will likely cover;
c) Show opportunity to go deeper. Knowing how rival papers will zig, allows you to zag. Social drama as an ethnographic theory is more complex than most media “ritualistic” coverage of it.
d) Open up stories on the periphery. One way ethnographic understanding of the social drama is more complex is the “liminal” phases of social drama—or the margins. Understanding and learning to anticipate liminal phases is an untapped area for unique reporting, while maintaining relevance to the community experiencing the crisis.
How it works
Social Drama
Anthropologist Victor Turner came up with the dynamic view of society as a constantly becoming process. Turner is a household name in anthropology for his concept of “social drama” among others. According to Turner, social drama is “a sequence of social interactions of a conflictive, competitive, or agonistic type.”3 This sequence includes: breach, crisis, redress, and reintegration or schism. The social drama begins when a member of a community breaks a rule (breach); sides are taken for or against the rule breaker (crisis); repairs are enacted (redress); if the repairs work, the group returns to an equilibrium (reintegration); but if the repairs fail, the group separates (schism). Between these sequences are rites of passage, rituals, and liminal phases in between. Here, those involved are between identities. There’s a questioning of identity (valid or fraudulent), interim positions may be created, and hierarchies turned upside down.
The media’s role within social drama
Breach: A breach occurs in a community. Journalists don’t often learn about the breach until the social drama is in “crisis” stage.
Crisis: Sides are taken. News outlets tend to contribute to the leitmotif of crisis by producing a flurry of news in the first few weeks.
Redress: Governing bodies (institutions, or respected individuals) will begin to leverage authority: firings, investigations, resignations, reviews, hearings, lawsuits, demands for apologies, etc… Headlines of redress often include words like “demands, apologies, cancelled, calls for” etc…
Reintegration or schism: The sides reconcile and come back together; or they break apart to form their own distinct groups. Although this may represent “the end” of a social drama, it is still an important part of the story to the community affected and merits reporting.
Liminality
Liminality as a sociologically useful concept denotes the middle phase of any ritual process.
Turner’s concept of liminality, or being on the social periphery while waiting to get through to the next phase, refers to places and people on the margin. But in a larger social drama, it can also refer to ‘those towns and regions which have been ”left behind” in the modern race for progress’, and where their geographic marginality is also ‘a mark of being a social periphery’4. Ritual’s liminal capacity is innovative. It’s in the liminal spaces between the social drama phases that you’ll find some new story angles.
In addition to the stories and opinions of liminal people and places, an interesting untapped resource for story material is the fact that social and ritual authorities who are concerned with maintaining the status quo often attempt to control rites of passage rituals. This is because rites of passage proscribe social status and identities in the face of changes and crises that may alter or challenge the standing social order. And therein lies interesting stories too.
Further Reading
- Marc LaFleur, Director of Health Strategy at Gemic (a consulting firm that uses ethnographic research methods) wrote an interesting review of “The Future of Patienthood” here.
- For a meta review and examples of the role of news organizations in the social drama, see Michael McDevitt’s book: Where Ideas Go To Die: The fate of intellect in American journalism (and in particular Chapter 6).
- Turner, Victor. The Anthropology of Performance. New York: PAJ Publications, 1988; p. 33.
- Shields, Rob. Places on the Margin: Alternative Geographies of Modernity. New York: Routledge, 1991; p. 3.