”Uteliaille toimittajille pettymystä ei näytetä”

Kaunokirjallisen journalismin poetiikkaa aikakauslehtireportaasissa

• Maria Lassila-Merisalo Jyväskylän yliopisto

DOI: https://doi.org/10.30665/av.74720

Abstract

“Their disappointment is concealed from the nosy reporters.” The Poetics of Literary Journalism in Reportage

This article centers on an eye-witness reportage, “Myrskyn silmässä” (“In the Eye of the Storm”), written by Miira Lähteenmäki and published in the Finnish magazine, Image, in 2000. The reportage deals with the S26 demonstrations against the World Bank and the IMF, which took place in Prague in September 2000.

I regard this work of reportage as a piece of nonfiction, a “third” genre between fiction and fact. My aim is to compare the reportage and its implied reader to literary journalism on the one hand, and to traditional news journalism on the other hand. I apply methods from both media and literary studies. The methods include analysis of 1) the actual speakers and the actors who are subjects of speech, 2) the diegetic and mimetic features and their functions, and 3) types of speech presentation in the text.

By these means I find that the repor¬tage gives its reader critical tools to weigh the information it presents, thereby shif¬ting much of the responsibility for inter¬pretation from the reporter-narrator to the reader. I conclude that the self-reflexi¬ve and interpretative reporter-narrator of “Myrskyn silmässä” is more typical of li¬terary journalism than of traditional news journalism.