Poetry and Journalism Revisited: Toward an Affective Dimension of Journalism Culture

Abstract

This article seeks to reconcile disparate conceptions of thinking and feeling in journalism by foregrounding an affective dimension of news epistemology through the example of journalistic poetry. Drawing from Archibald MacLeish’s classic 20th-century lecture linking knowledge and the imagination, and locating Postema and Deuze’s continuum of journalism and the arts within Hanitzsch’s broader framework of journalism culture, I explore the generative spectrum in which certain kinds of journalism are best performed as poetry, and certain kinds of poetry are simply affective journalism by another name. The argument draws on historical, cultural, and literary scholarship to define the relationship between poetry and journalism, review historical uses of poetry in newspapers, show how poetry developed as a boundary object that “objective” news has defined itself against, and present four mini-case studies of poetry doing journalistic work in the 21st century.