Time To Engage

Abstract

This article explores De Correspondent as a specific example of slow journalism that aims to establish an alternative for quality journalism governed by the objectivity regime. It offers an analysis of the way the platform redefines journalism’s quality standards against the background of the tension between traditional modernistic claims to truth and competing postmodern ideas on the social construction of knowledge. Moreover, the article examines how these ideals are translated into journalistic texts. The article argues that both in its rhetoric and in its actual practice, the articles in De Correspondent deviate from the principles of quality journalism under the objectivity regime. They are structured around the mediating subjectivity of the journalists and are thus openly subjective. Yet, they also draw on empirical research and scientific knowledge. Moreover, they are transparent about the reporting process, which through their reflection becomes an integral part of the story itself. Thus, being transparent about their combination of different forms of knowledge, rooted in more traditional rational-positivistic inquiry as well as in personal experience and emotion, they try to reconcile the tension between the modernist and postmodernist claims to truth.