Field Notes

Reportage between Periodical and Journalism Studies: From Encounter to Exchange? 

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Abstract

This contribution starts from the assumption that reportage, as a genre positioned between documentary and literary modes, offers a unique opportunity for dialogue between periodical studies and journalism studies. Within journalism studies, reportage is often discussed as an epistemological challenge. How can the journalist be both witness and narrator? How is the tension between fact and interpretation negotiated, and in what ways is the reader’s trust established? Although recent developments in journalism studies have questioned the long dominant notions of objectivity and standardization, pivotal to journalism as a profession, reportage is still frequently understood as a two-part entity in which information and its narration can be clearly distinguished. However, scholars such as Pascal Sigg have emphasized that reportage is not merely a journalistic genre but a way of understanding social reality through experience and engagement with reporters acting as ‘human media’. Periodical studies, by contrast, offers a diachronic perspective that makes it possible to trace the complex evolution of genres over time in relation to both social context and media infrastructure. In this field note, I explore the development of reportage in the Yugoslav student newspaper Student over the course of three decades (1937‒68) to show how the intersection and synergy of journalism studies and periodical studies methodologies reveal mechanisms of meaningmaking in reportage that would otherwise remain obscured. In this way, reportage becomes a site of encounter: a genre that demands theoretical reflection on knowledge and truth, but also empirical analysis of how it is produced, published, and read within the periodical context. Thus, this field note argues that the epistemological and methodological exchange between journalism studies and periodical studies, examined through the (fate of) reportage, can contribute to a more nuanced and profound understanding of publics in both the past and the present. 

Keywords: reportage, literary journalism, journalism studies, human media

How to Cite:

Lalatović, J., (2026) “Reportage between Periodical and Journalism Studies: From Encounter to Exchange? ”, Journal of European Periodical Studies 11(1), 96-102. doi: https://doi.org/10.21825/jeps.101096