Call for Abstracts: JLIC Special Issue “Journalism & Literature”

Guest editors:

Chiara Cremona (Vrije Universiteit Brussel)
Jelle Mast (Vrije Universiteit Brussel)
Thomas Mantzaris (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki/Vrije Universiteit Brussel)
Marcela Scibiorska (Université Libre de Bruxelles/Vrije Universiteit Brussel).

Call for Abstracts: Special Issue “Journalism & Literature”

Traditionally seen as strange bedfellows, literature and journalism seem to occupy opposing realms. While the first is considered to be anchored in creativity and authorship, the latter’s dominant standards—mostly informed by Western professional ideology—tend to rest on the cornerstone value of ‘objectivity’ (Wien 2006; Schudson 2001). Literary works seek to be timeless, whereas journalism has a strict relation to current events (see Shapiro 2014). However, scholars in both the field of literary and journalism studies have brought nuance to this dichotomy, showing that the relationship between both disciplines is built on centuries of mutual influences, exchanges, and porous limits between practices and genres (e.g., Postema and Deuze 2020). Notable cases of writers working as journalists (famous examples include Charles Dickens, Emile Zola, George Orwell, Ernest Hemingway and Arnon Grünberg) and journalists publishing widely recognized literary works (such as Svetlana Aleksijevitch, Oriana Fallaci or Gay Talese), as well as literary movements like New Journalism and Gonzo Journalism, have illustrated how both worlds incessantly intersect in the modern, media-centred era, leading to cross-fertilization through common practices relying on storytelling.

Literary scholars have long been interested in the role journalism has played in the development of new literary forms and practices (Thérenty and Vaillant 2004; Khalifa et al. 2011), ranging from the thematization of journalism in literary works and journalistic storytelling, to the birth of literary genres on the pages or as appendices of newspapers, such as the short story (Bernstein 2019) or the realistic novel written in installments (Delafield 2016). In addition, literary classics such as Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Sir. Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Return of Sherlock Holmes found a publication outlet in press periodicals (Vranken 2018), while authors such as Joseph Conrad “might well be unknown today,” were it not for their prolific writing in such media (Donovan 73). Magazines such as The New Yorker and Harper’s follow the tradition to the present day, featuring new work by contemporary authors such as Don DeLillo and Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie. Research in journalism and communication studies has looked, among others, at the specificities of the newspaper as a discursive space (Saminadayar-Perrin 2007); at the history and distinguishing features of literary journalism (Bak and Reynolds 2023); at the normative frameworks, practices and role perceptions shaping cultural journalism or arts reporting (Chong 2019); or at the aesthetic and/or epistemological values of contemporary developments in journalistic storytelling or narrative journalism genres, including graphic journalism (Schack 2014), feature journalism (Steensen 2011) and long-form and ‘slow’ journalism (Barnhurst 2003; Le Masurier 2015). Additionally, amidst the complex interplay of social, technological and market dynamics reshaping the contemporary journalistic field, journalism scholarship has pinpointed the gradual visibility or reappraisal of authorial subjectivity in journalistic practices (e.g., Mast and Temmerman, forthcoming; Coward 2013) while others along the same lines have drawn attention to an ‘interpretive’ (e.g. Pauly 2014) or ‘emotional’ (e.g. Wahl-Jorgensen, 2020) turn’ in journalism (studies).

Beyond this interwovenness of discourses, many types of journalistic media have been mobilized by actors from the literary field: periodical press has been used by authors to create a specific posture (Van Nuijs 2011) and shape their personal branding, and by publishers to market their catalogue and position themselves within their field (see e. g. Scibiorska and Wiart 2025). Journal pages provide a space for critics to contribute to shifts in values within the literary landscape (Basker 1997), and through book reviews to indicate a literary text’s initial critical reception. Moreover, the inherent intermediality and polyphony of newspapers, radio and television made them, especially since the early 20^th century, a fertile terrain of experimentation for authors offering the possibility for the blending of genres and forms where reality and fiction enter into dialogue (Van Nuijs et al. 2011), while the (mis)use of documents and journalistic language and layout has constituted a means for authors, artists, and editors to produce and distribute ideologically charged content. Later, the development of the Internet has led to the rise of new, hybrid and participative spaces, changing once again the dynamics and codes defining interactions between the two disciplines. Part of the recently renewed interest in narrative and interpretive journalism indeed follows from the interactive, hypertextual, and/or multimodal affordances of the digital era, while a precarious business model, wavering professional status, and declining public trust, compel newsrooms to adapt, innovate and invest in audience engagement. This has opened up a space for the revitalization or emergence of nontraditional news practices and genres, which come in many forms, ranging from multimedia longreads (representing a ‘new wave of literary journalism’ (Jacobson et al. 2016) to VR and other ‘immersive’ visual technologies (Mabrook and Singer 2019) to (serialized) narrative podcasts (Lindgren 2016) and blogs.

In more recent years, the incursion of artificial intelligence gave rise to new, ethically charged questions related to authorship (Reijers et al. 2025) and the reliability of information across media (Schirrmacher and Mousavi 2024). Moreover, the current political climate has once again put the issue of censorship to the forefront of scientific reflection, reminding us that free speech needs to remain central to both literary and journalistic discourses.

This special issue aims to further explore the crossings between literature and journalism by looking at them from a historical and transcultural perspective, combining literary and journalism studies. We invite proposals for articles that focus on intersections of literature and journalism including, but not limited to:

• Literary representations of journalistic practice;
• The history of serialization in literary publishing;
• Writing practices informed by journalism;
• The notions of writer as journalist/journalist as author;
• Forms, genres, practices and/or normative frameworks shaping narrative journalism or cultural journalism;
• Critical reception of literature in media contexts (e.g. book reviews);
• The rise of podcasts and audiobooks;
• The literary use of journalistic media (periodicals, radio, broadcasting, online);
• Post-truth politics and the rise of alternative facts;
• The intermediality/multimodality of archival material as raw data;
• Contemporary practices of censorship;
• The growing impact of AI technologies. 

Works Cited

Bak, John S., and Bill Reynolds. The Routledge Companion to World Literary Journalism. Routledge, 2023.

Barnhurst, Kevin G. “The Makers of Meaning: National Public Radio and the New Long Journalism, 1980–2000.” Political Communication, vol. 20, no. 1, 2003, pp. 1–22.

Basker, James. “Criticism and the Rise of Periodical Literature.” The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, edited by H. B. Nisbet and Claude Rawson, Cambridge UP, 1997, pp. 316-32.

Bernstein, Susan David. “Short Forms: Serialization and Short Fiction.” The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Literature, edited by Dennis Denisoff and Talia Schaffer, Routledge, 2019, pp. 33-44.

Chong, Phillipa. “Valuing Subjectivity in Journalism: Bias, Emotions, and Self-interest as Tools in Arts Reporting.” Journalism, vol. 20, no. 3, 2019, pp. 427-43.

Coward, Rosalind. Speaking Personally: The Rise of Subjective and Confessional Journalism. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013.

Delafield, Catherine. Serialization and the Novel in Mid-Victorian Magazines. Routledge, 2015.

Donovan, Stephen. “Serialization.” The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad, edited by J. H. Stape, Cambridge UP, 2015, pp. 73-87.

Jacobson, Susan, et al. “The Digital Animation of Literary Journalism.” Journalism, vol. 17, no. 4, 2016, pp. 527–46.

Khalifa, Dominique, et al. La civilisation du journal: Histoire culturelle et littéraire de la presse au XIXè siècle. Nouveau Monde Editions, 2011.

Le Masurier, Megan. “What is Slow Journalism?” Journalism Practice, vol. 9, no. 2, pp. 138–     52.

Lindgren, Mia. “Personal narrative journalism and podcasting”. Radio Journal: International       Studies in Broadcast & Audio Media, vol. 14, no. 1, 2016, pp. 23–41.

Mabrook, Radwa and Jane B. Singer. “Virtual Reality, 360° Video, and Journalism Studies: Conceptual Approaches to Immersive Technologies.” Journalism Studies, vol. 20, no. 4, 2019, pp. 2096–112.

Mast, Jelle, and Martina Temmerman. The Journalistic “I,” special issue of Journalism Practice. 2025 (forthcoming)

Pauly, John J. “The New Journalism and the Struggle for Interpretation.” Journalism, vol. 15, no. 5, 2014, pp. 589–604.

Postema, Stijn and Mark Deuze. “Artistic Journalism: Confluence in Forms, Values and Practices.” Journalism Studies, vol. 21, no. 10, 2020, pp. 1305-22.

Reijers, Wessel, et al. Introduction to the Ethics of Emerging Technologies. Palgrave Macmillan, 2025.

Saminadayar-Perrin, Corinne. Les discours du journal. Presses universitaires de Saint-Étienne, 2007.

Schirrmacher, Beate, and Nafiseh Mousavi, editors. Truth Claims Across Media. Palgrave Macmillan, 2024.

Scibiorska, Marcela, and Louis Wiart. Formes et enjeux des publications promotionnelles d’éditeurs, special issue of Communication & Langages, no. 221, 2025.

Schack, Todd. “‘A Failure of Language’: Achieving Layers of Meaning in Graphic Journalism.” Journalism, vol. 15, no. 1, 2014, pp. 109-27.

Schudson, Michael. “The Objectivity Norm in American Journalism.” Journalism, vol. 2, no. 2, 2001, pp. 149-70.

Shapiro, Ivor. “Why Democracies Need a Functional Definition of Journalism Now More Than ever.” Journalism Studies, vol. 15, no. 5, 2014, pp. 555-65.

Steensen, Steen. “The Featurization of Journalism.” Nordicom Review, vol. 32, no. 2, 2011, pp. 49–61.

Thérenty, Marie-Eve and Alain Vaillant (eds). Presses et plumes. Journalisme et littérature au XIXe siècle. Nouveau Monde Éd, 2004.

Van Nuijs, Laurence. Postures journalistiques et littéraires. Special issue of Interférences littéraires/Literaire interferenties, no. 6, 2011.

Van Nuijs, Laurence, et al. Croisées de la fiction. Journalisme et littérature. Special issue of Interférences littéraires/Literaire interferenties, no. 7, 2011.

Vranken, Thomas. Literary Experiments in Magazine Publishing: Beyond Serialization. Routledge, 2019.

Wien, Charlotte. “Defining Objectivity Within Journalism: An Overview.” Nordicom Review, vol. 26, no. 2, 2006, pp. 3-15.