John J. Pauly

Sports Journalism as Moral and Ethical Discourse

This paper explores the marginalized practice of sportswriting to demonstrate the limited ways in which the question “who is a journalist?” has been answered within the profession. Following John Dewey and Raymond Williams, we offer an alternative view of democratic culture that values narrative as well as information. We also discuss how “New Journalists” (and other writers since), in their quest for fresh, sophisticated storytelling strategies, turned to sports as a cultural activity worthy of serious examination. Our goal is to demonstrate that sportswriting fundamentally resembles other forms of reporting and that journalism should not use sports as an ethical straw man against which to defend the virtue of its serious work. This suspension of our usual ethical judgments would deepen our sense of the moral significance of sportswriting and allow us to rethink journalisms relation to democratic culture in productive new ways.

Moral fables of public relations practice: The tylenol and exxon valdez cases

Discussions of the Tylenol and Exxon Valdez cases found in textbooks, public relations scholarship, and news coverage are assessed to understand the meanings that practitioners, educators, critics, and journalists have attributed to those events. The essay objects to a central claim made by critics who say these cases set standards for ethical behavior in public relations. This claim, according to us, mistakes moral drama for ethical deliberation.

The New Journalism and the struggle for interpretation

Scholarship in literary journalism often focuses on matters of technique and style, and on the ethical challenges of immersion reporting. In some contexts, however, literary journalism may also take on a sense of moral purpose, as when reporters assert the importance of their interpretations, or readers attribute special meaning to a particular style of writing. The New Journalism of the 1960s and 1970s offers a revealing example of how magazine and book publishing markets and writer–editor relations inevitably shape journalists’ interpretations and lend them a sense of social significance. The New Journalism did not stand alone and apart from the larger profession, but took root within a network of writers, editors, and publishers, and grew out of a wider, ongoing debate over the nature of journalists’ interpretive responsibilities.

Book Review: Doug Underwood The undeclared war between journalism and fiction: Journalists as genre benders in literary history

Doug Underwood The undeclared war between journalism and fiction: Journalists as genre benders in literary history New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. 260 pp. ISBN 9781137353474 Reviewed by: John J Pauly, Almost 200 pages into his bumpy and aggravating account of the relationship between journalism and fiction writing, Doug Underwood arrives at this succinct statement: ‘the influence of journalism upon the fiction writing tradition may be of more significance than anything journalists have produced as journalism through much of literary history’ (p. 194). Would that The Undeclared War Between Journalism and Fiction had begun with this simple and testable claim. We could then have asked, more directly, the right sorts of questions. What forms of journalism are we talking about? Newspaper work? Magazine writing? Book-length investigations? Which tastemakers and critics set the contours of the fiction writing NOT THE PUBLISHED VERSION; this is the author’s final, peer-reviewed manuscript. The published version may be accessed by following the link in the citation at the bottom of the page. [Journalism: Thoery, Practice & Criticism, Vol 17, No. 7 (October, 2015): pg. 934-935. DOI. This article is