CRITICAL APPROACHES TO JOURNALISM

Critical Approaches to Journalism

Critical Approaches to Journalism

Reconstructing The Public Sphere: from The Paris Review to Intelligent Life

In this article author states that Like many great innovations that later appear inevitable and indispensable, the Paris Review interviews got started without any notion that they might one day be acclaimed as canonical. On the contrary, the young Americans who started the magazine, in the city that gave it its name, imagined the interviews as an antidote to the academic formalism that dominated other literary journals.

According to the author at that time—the early 1950s—such publications were largely preoccupied with criticism, and their editorial boards tended to be allied with one or another aesthetic stance or political creed by which they set their agendas. The men who started The Paris Review took the dissenting view that instead of pontificating about writing they should simply publish the stuff: fiction and poetry, nonfiction and plays. Who needed a theory, much less a dogma? “The literary magazines seem today on the verge of doing away with literature, not with any philistine bludgeon but by smothering it under the weight of learned chatter,” William Styron (at the age of twenty-seven, one of the elders of the original Paris Review circle) declared in a sort of antimanifesto in the inaugural issue

Excellence, then, would be the magazine's only editorial requirement, and the interviews were conceived as the best way to discuss writing and the writing life in their own terms—by letting writers speak for themselves about their work.

According to the author it didn't hurt that conducting a sustained Q&A with an established master offered the additional advantage to a new, virtually penniless and unheard of “little magazine,” of publishing the biggest names in contemporary literature. In 1953, the first issue of the magazine carried an interview with E. M. Forster, and just five years later, when the Viking Press published the first collection of Paris Review interviews under the title “Writers at Work,” the table of contents boasted, in addition to Forster, Nelson Algren, Truman Capote, Joyce Cary, William Faulkner, François Mauriac, Alberto Moravia, Frank O'Connor, Dorothy Parker, Françoise Sagan, Georges Simenon, William Styron, James Thurber, Robert Penn Warren, Thornton Wilder, and Angus Wilson. The magazine was only publishing twice a year during much of that period, yet the interview archive was already so rich that there wasn't room in that first collection for Isak Dinesen, Ralph Ellison, or Graham Greene.

Read all about it: 'Element of Fraud' in Journalism Education

In this article author states that issue of 'bums on seats' has helped create 'an element of fraud in journalism education' in the UK, a leading journalism professor at the University of Kent said today.

Many students on journalism courses will not achieve their goal of entering the profession because they lack the academic ability and skills. It has been admitted that to degrees people who desperately want to be journalists but have no realistic prospect of getting ...