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This article explores how narrative journalism challenges dominant assumptions about objectivity by taking the mediating subjectivity of the reporter as a structuring principle for stories. By comparing the coverage of the Middle East conflict by British award-winning reporter Robert Fisk and Dutch novelist/reporter Arnon Grunberg we show how overt subjectivity is displayed in different manners and how this affects the persuasiveness of reporting. Fisk adopts a personal–engaged subjectivity that fits in with the tradition of ethnographic realism and in that respect abides by the fundamental maxims of traditional journalism. Conversely, Grunberg displays a personal–ironic subjectivity that resembles cultural phenomenology and constantly calls into question whether journalism is able to represent reality univocally. We argue that both approaches fit in with a broader cultural development that disputes the possibility of objective truth and questions the corresponding epistemological procedures. Nevertheless, the latter approach particularly raises doubt among readers and critics because it subverts the profession’s claim to truth.

In this article, we explore how entrepreneurial journalists from a wide variety of national contexts present ‘impact’ as one of the aims in their work. By exploring the variety, incongruences, and strategic considerations in the discourse on impact of those at the forefront of journalistic innovation, we provide a much-needed empirical account of the changing conceptualisation of what journalism is and what it is for. Our data show how impact becomes an ideologically as well as strategically driven endeavour as the entrepreneurs try to carve out their niche and position themselves both in relation to traditional counterparts and other startups. Ultimately, we provide empirical insight into a number of tensions that remain underlying in the discourse on constructive journalism, an increasingly popular conceptualisation that refers to a future-oriented, solution-driven, active form of journalism. We show how our interviewees marry different, commonly-deemed incompatible practices and values, thus challenging binary distinctions at the heart of conceptualisations of journalism, also perpetuated in the discourse on constructive journalism. As pioneers in the field, startups can be argued to inspire journalistic as well as social innovation, and furthermore push for a more inclusive understanding of the divergent conceptualisations and practices that together make up the amalgam that we call ‘journalism’.

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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.