Challenge the Straw Man #1: Still more informants become narrators

So is it really still controversial for reporters to make use of the first person or to get otherwise personal in their writing style?

In their recent article on image-evoking language constructions in written news (which appeared in Nordicom Review) Ebbe Grunwald and Jørgen Lauridsen have a pretty clear statistical answer to the 'otherwise' part of my question:

Parallel to [...] relatively rapid changes in the newspaper medium itself, new writing and narrative forms have appeared. The known genres, e.g. news journalism, constructed within the frames of the 'inverted pyramid' now often appear as hybrid forms. This means that personal styles of expression more frequently find their way into newspaper articles where they challenge the anonymous writing style of traditional journalism. (p. 93-94)

Grunwald and Lauridsen are mapping the use of exposures, a.k.a. linguistic image constructions, a.k.a. showing as opposed to telling, in five Danish national papers to discover how frequently such techniques are used.

It is a premise of their investigation that as soon as a reporter creates an image ("the faces of our creditors look more and more disbelieving") instead of making a general or abstract statement ("the credit-worthiness of the country has deteriorated"; this is Grunwald and Lauridsen's example), the reporter becomes an active narrator rather than simply an informant. When you invent an image like that you have obviously made an interpretation, selected and emphasised certain aspects of the material at the expense of others. As a consequence, the journalist's presence and her function as a rhetorical decision maker becomes visible, and readers begin to form an opinion about the journalist and her credibility.

Grunwald and Lauridsen conclude that exposures have in fact found their way into Danish news journalism, but the frequency varies from one paper to the next (the most image evoking news journalism is found in Politiken and Ekstra Bladet).

So the traditional paradigm of news journalism is still powerful - the straw man is not all straw - but our journalistic informants do seem to become still more willing to explicitly adopt the role of narrators.

As for the force and impact of these linguistic exposures as an indicator of increased narrator activity, Grunwald and Lauridsen have studied that too. I'll get back to that part in a later episode of Attack the Straw Man.