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Scholarship in literary journalism often focuses on matters of technique and style, and on the ethical challenges of immersion reporting. In some contexts, however, literary journalism may also take on a sense of moral purpose, as when reporters assert the importance of their interpretations, or readers attribute special meaning to a particular style of writing. The New Journalism of the 1960s and 1970s offers a revealing example of how magazine and book publishing markets and writer-editor relations inevitably shape journalists' interpretations and lend them a sense of social significance. The New Journalism did not stand alone and apart from the larger profession, but took root within a network of writers, editors, and publishers, and grew out of a wider, ongoing debate over the nature of journalists' interpretive responsibilities.

J Discussions of the Tylenol and Exxon Valdez cases found in textbooks, public relations scholarship, and news coverage are assessed to understand the meanings that practitioners, educators, critics, and journalists have attributed to those events. The essay objects to a central claim made by critics who say these cases set standards for ethical behavior in public relations. This claim, according to us, mistakes moral drama for ethical deliberation.

The myth of “the local” powerfully informs American journalism's talk about itself. The term local has received less scrutiny than other keywords of the profession, such as objectivity, public, and independence. Yet references to local news figure prominently in many contemporary discussions of newspaper readership, coverage, management, and mission. Different groups interpret the meaning of the local for their own purposes. Ultimately, however, their discourse masks the collapse of the social worlds that the term local purports to describe. The myth of the local persists because it dramatizes and articulates the dilemmas of a commercial press in a democratic society.