Researching With Our Hair on Fire: Three Frameworks for Rethinking News in a Postnormative World

Abstract

This article urges a jolt in journalism theory commensurate with the urgent state of planetary affairs—including catastrophic climate change and spreading authoritarianism—that journalism’s weaknesses have helped to precipitate and that its strengths might help to contain. The article explores three conceptual frameworks offering alternative approaches to conceiving news that might disrupt the stasis of our polarized societies: “existential journalism,” or a call to radical independence; Buddhist news values, based on ontological and ethical commitments favoring interdependence and compassion; and nonrepresentational news, inspired by an epistemologically expansive style of social research privileging affect, immanence, and wide-eyed attention. Attending to journalisms of engagement, compassion, and everyday joys might disrupt the heuristic partisanship and protective avoidance that characterize citizens’ contemporary relations with news, opening possibilities for more generative politics.