Developing rapport with journalists during ethnographic research
Developing trusting relationships with study participants mounts a serious challenge for any researcher – but especially for those in their ethnographic encounters with media professionals. When it comes to the “sideways” study of journalists this challenge becomes more pronounced, as journalists are inherently likely to mask their authentic interpretations and genuine feelings – and to do so more skillfully than do other categories of media practitioners. There is a significant parallelism between ethnography and journalistic …
Local Journalism on ‘Unemployed Kurds’ in Kars
“It continued snowing all morning, while Ka walked the streets playing the intrepid reporter—visiting coffeehouses packed with unemployed Kurds, interviewing voters, taking notes—and it was still snowing later […].”[I] This sentence is from Snow, described as “the first and the last political novel” by its Nobel Laureate author Orhan Pamuk. The book created a public debate even before its publication. After having appeared in bookstores in January 2002, it became a bestseller by gaining great …
Why Media Anthropology in Turkey?
In her review article in 1993, Debra Spitulnik writes, “there is as yet no ‘anthropology of mass media’” (1993: 293). In the more than twenty years following her piece, not only have media emerged as a more mainstream area of inquiry within the discipline of anthropology but media scholars outside of anthropology have increasingly approached ethnography as a critical method to scrutinize media processes. The emerging eld of media anthropology highlighted “the necessity of linking …