There are many journalistic challenges that ethnographers can help solve.
Know where journalists and editors are struggling. Next, identify where you can help. This positions you as not just another freelance writer, but the missing piece from the puzzle.
Highlight your trust-building skills
The biggest challenge facing journalists concerns trust. Audiences and communities don’t trust the media to accurately report stories.
This is precisely where ethnography excels.
Ethnographers are experts in gaining and maintaining the trust of the communities they research. They are trusted to tell stories on a group’s own terms, from their perspective.
When pitching your story idea, concisely highlight examples that demonstrate your established trust: years welcomed by a specific community, rapport built through immersive field research, or the extensive hours and interviews conducted to draw meaningful conclusions.
With the trust, integrity, and rapport that ethnographers bring, media outlets grappling with distrust find powerful solutions.
Add a “w”
Who? What? Where? When? Why? Critics of the classic 5-w’s say it omits context. An ethnographer is well-placed to add some concise context to the story, placing facts in a cultural lens to deliver the “whole” story1.
Use your research skills and abilities to locate under represented voices to find new stories. Ethnographic methods that can be repurposed in this way include residual-dominant-emergent (RDE) thinking, key informants, and even semiotic squares!
Employ the ethnographic approach
The ethnographic approach is your secret sauce. This gives you the overarching ability to see new perspectives and be trusted by communities to tell these points of view.
Interview like an ethnographer
The ethnographic interview can go deeper than traditional journalistic interviews thanks to its considered approach to reducing apprehension, gaining trust, being aware of cultural bias, building rapport and more. More on similarities and difference between ethnographic and journalistic interview, here.
Further Reading
- Media anthropologist Susan L. Alan discusses “adding a w” in depth in chapter 11 of Media Anthropology: Informing Global Citizens (edited by Susan L. Allan). ↩︎