Lost dogs on close inspection

All stories look the same from a distance, and the ambition of narrative journalists is to make readers realize that a given story is 'not like all other lost dog or love stories'. This is how Nancy Graham Holm phrases it as she explains why subjectivity is No Longer a Dirty Word:

Narrative journalists have a social conscience and they claim their mission is to remind us what it means to be human. Information alone, they say, does not inform. In the postmodern age, journalists must assign meaning. Participation in events and subsequent interpretation are required to break down the psychological barriers of apathy and cynicism.

To me there's a remarkable echo of passages from my own dissertation here (except that I avoid using the term 'postmodern' all along). At one point I sum up the ambition of personal and spectacular journalism as that of 'making the world seem interesting and workable' which might as well have been phrased in Graham Holm's way as 'breaking down the psychological barriers of apathy and cynicism'. And this is why close readings as well as field work (taking close looks and making close descriptions) are important in journalism studies. They supply the details which prevent our work from being just one more lost dog story after the other.