Revisiting Narrative Journalism as One of The Futures of Journalism

Abstract

News making and reporting are caught in a process of rationalisation which can be summarised in the injunction to produce fast, to write short and simple, and to value useful news for audiences only interested by practical matters. This paper would, firstly, suggest that if this new style of journalism has produced interesting innovations, its costs are more worthy of debate than its contributions. It would then argue that mobilising the competitive advantages of a tradition of investigative and narrative journalism may be a reasonable bet to struggle against the news supplied by blogs, aggregators and short-format news sources. A third part suggests how this apparent “back to basics” approach involves nonetheless significant changes in both the training of journalists and the nature of the medium used for the diffusion of this renewed style of reporting.

Full text

Revisiting Narrative Journalism as One of The Futures
of Journalism
Erik Neveu
To cite this version:
Erik Neveu. Revisiting Narrative Journalism as One of The Futures of Journalism. Jour-
nalism Studies, Taylor & Francis (Routledge): SSH Titles, 2014, 15 (5), pp.533 - 542.
<10.1080/1461670X.2014.885683>.<hal-01077847>
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REVISITING NARRATIVE JOURNALISM
AS ONE OF THE FUTURES OF JOURNALISM
Erik NEVEU*
* CRAPE Centre de Recherches sur l'Action Politique en Europe UMR CNRS 6051
News-making and reporting are caught in a process of rationalisation which
can be summarized in the injuction to produce fast, to write short and
simple and to value useful news for audiences only interested by practical
matters. This paper would firstly suggest that if this new style of journalism
has produced interesting innovations, its costs are worthier debating than its
contributions. It would then argue that mobilising the competitive
advantages of a tradition of investigative and narrative journalism may be a
reasonable bet to struggle against the news supplied by blogs, aggregators
and short-format news sources. A third part suggests how this apparent
“back to basics” involves however significant changes in both the training of
journalists and the nature of the medium used for the diffusion of this
renewed style of reporting.
Keywords: Books; Immersion Journalism; Journalistic Writing; Narrative
Journalism, Social Sciences.

“This abominable and voluptuous act called reading the newspaper, by which
all the misfortunes and cataclysms of the universe during the last twenty four
hours, the battles which took the lives of fifty thousands men, the crimes, the
strikes, the bankruptcies, the fires, the poisonings, suicides and divorces, the
cruel emotions of the statesman and actor, transmuted for our private use, for
us who are not involved, into a morning delight, combine excellently, in a
specially tonic and exciting way, to the recommended ingestion of a few
mouthfuls of coffee with milk”
Marcel Proust (1923)
Warnings have been launched. Obituaries have been prepared. Even
conferences were organised. The news was sad: journalism was dying. In the
best cases its life chances were dubious. Editors, scholars and heads of
journalism schools have developed their explanations and diagnoses of the
current crisis. Journalism is facing today a most complex combination of
challenges (Neveu, 2010). It goes from the institutionalisation of job
insecurity for its practitioners, to the blurring of the border between
professionalism and amateurism, fact-checking and comments on rumours
(Kovach & Rosenstiel, 2011), without forgetting the declining support of the
younger generations to the idea that news is something worth a few pounds
or euros a week.
The aim of this contribution is to highlight one of the opportunities for
a new momentum for journalism. Among the major reasons of the current
crisis is a double process of rationalisation, which could also be deciphered
as a double process of impoverishment, of disconnection of journalism with a
significant part of the readership’s expectations and abilities. On the one
hand this rationalisation has targeted the lay-out and templates of the press.
To face the growing competition from television and websites, editors and
consultants have developed mimetic imitations of the screens on the printed
page. Many studies on the “form of news” (Barnhust & Nerone, 2002;
Broesma, Ed, 2007) suggest a process of rationalisation and clarification of
the lay-out since the end of the 19th century, expressed in a more visible
organisation of the newspapers into specialised news-sections, in clearer
visual distinction among the articles structuring each page. The moves
toward shorter formats, the replacement of long verbatim quotations by
compact sound bites (Hallin, 1994) or interpretive commentaries (Schudson,
1982) are also well-documented trans-national trends. The recent
downsizing of the newsrooms with its reduction of the number of journalists
dedicated to specialised news-beats (labour, international…) has
strengthened these evolutions. More and more papers are produced by less
specialised journalists, invited to express their professional skills in the
double-binding art of making sense of a more and more complex world in
shorter and shorter formats. On the other hand rationalisation has had a
strong impact on the contents of the press too. The number of news-sections
was often reduced to those considered as more reader-friendly, as
maximising audiences or channelling significant amounts of advertising. A
publisher’s memo argues that the Miami Herald would “focus its newsroom

resources on nine subject areas that the readers have told us are especially
important and useful: local government; education; sports; environment,
consumer news, Florida news, Latin America. Health/medicine and Crime”
(Cook, 1995: 173-4). Such a redefinition of the “useful” topics worth
significant coverage mirrors the trend towards what has been coined as
“journalism of communication”, by the researchers of the Canadian
University Laval (Brin, Charron, de Bonville, 2004). In such a role-definition
(which is not completely different from what Eide and Knight -1999- describe
in Norway as “service journalism”) the challenge of journalism is to reach of
audiences overwhelmed by floods of communications. The good journalist
combines humour, closeness and usefulness to conquer the audience’s
attention. He/she is no longer firstly in charge of making sense of the
working of the polity or of geopolitical stakes. She/he is a mediator, guiding
and counselling audiences made of consumers in quest of good bargains,
pleasant entertainments, useful advices on one’s health management or
financial investments. Even questioning which politician should deserve
one’s vote may be seen as contributing to rational consumerism. This
journalism can be useful and even the critical sociologist may be happy to
read a good column on cooking or travelling, to discover in a magazine a
useful website. But the price of this service journalism is what the French
liberal Philosopher Benjamin Constant described two centuries ago as the
paradox of the “freedom of the modern”: we can live in a society whilst
forgetting than there is such a thing as a society.
The result of this double process of rationalisation as a combination of
compact and useful news processing is nowhere more visible than in the free
newspapers (Metro, 20 Minutes) which are today market leaders in many
European countries (Rieffel, 2010). They supply in a light tabloid format a
highly selective, highly condensed coverage of the news. The balance among
news-section values a significant attention to sports, lifestyles and consumer
service. But such an evolution is not the monopoly or the press. The French
TV channel M6 – struggling to gain its consecration as one of the major
networks made the strategic choice of broadcasting news bulletins reduced
to six minutes air-time.
This paper will develop a three-fold reflection on those trends. It will
suggest in a first part that, if this new style of journalism has produced
innovations, its costs are worthier debating than its contributions. It would
then argue that something like a return to the comparative advantages of a
tradition of investigative and narrative journalism may be a reasonable bet to
struggle against the news supplied from blogs, aggregators and short-format
news sources. In a third part, I would argue that the paradox of this
apparent “back to basics” is the need for significant changes in both the
training of journalists and the nature of the media used for the diffusion of
this redefined products of journalism.
Light news, Heavy costs.
The success of the free newspapers invites to go beyond the nostalgia
of an imaginary golden age when an enlightened citizenry would have
massively read the best of the broadsheets and felt a passionate commitment

for public affairs. One cannot make sense of the success of these lightweight
newspapers just by a depreciative description as “McPapers”. Their editors
and journalists invented a style of newspapers which fits with the habits of
millions of people having thirty minutes to browse news when they are
commuting. They have developed a skilled use of computer graphics and
maps, processing complex data into clear visual representations. The old
motto of the French newsrooms, “Ecrire pour son lecteur” (To write for one’s
reader) has probably be taken more seriously, transforming what was often
lip service into a more conscious anticipation of the readers’ tastes, more
probably into real attention to the audience’s wishes as defined by marketing
and RD departments. In France the free dailies have been able to channel
significant audiences back into newspaper-reading. An issue of Le Monde
costs 2 euros [1], a price often beyond the reach of students and working
class readers. The very short, dispatch-style, format of articles also satisfied
those among the potential readers who felt that too many news-sections
looked as made by specialists speaking to specialists, or that the French
style of journalism wad giving too much weight to journalists opinions and
comments. Brevity and condensation were thus perceived as producing a
crystal clear text, leaving the readers free to produce their own conclusions
and evaluations. The free dailies have also been a laboratory of convergence,
developing among their staff skills of translators, instantly converting a
paper into web pages or even TV footage.
But developing a balance sheet of this rationalization suggests the
question “what has been lost or weakened?” As the focus of this paper is the
final product of the journalists’ work we would pay attention to changes
which had a significant impact on the nature of the news.
The downsizing of news-rooms has produced a more “seated”
journalism, using more computer terminals and phone contacts than
investigating and ferreting out with old style “legwork”. This trend is
especially visible for the free newspapers with smaller staffs, depending more
on the recycling (Rébillard, 2006) and editing of press agency reports. Such
changes mean less oportunities for in-depth investigation, less time for
experiencing the “flesh”, flavours and scenes of the news. These changes also
create more layers of mediation (phone, reading of reports, commenting from
images seen on a TV screen) between the actors of events and the
journalists. They are less direct news gatherer, more ”processsors” to use
Tunstall’ typology (1971). The quarters of modern journalism facing the
strongest commercial pressures are less and less in situations where it could
express a basic claim such as “I was there, I saw it, I met them”. The stake
goes beyond trustworthyness. It questions the kind of narrative production
which flees beyond the reach of this journalism. How to portray characters
whom one never met directly [2]? How to describe spaces and actions only
viewed on the blurred images of a computer or summarized in a dispatch?
Paradoxically, the risk of producing fiction may be here stronger than when
exploring the frontier between reporting and literature….
The compulsory use of very short formats creates multiple challenges.
The Japanese art of the haïku suggests that inventing subtle, moving or
impressive images and meanings is possible even in short texts. But writing
good haikus is difficult. And making sense of the crisis of subprimes, of the

chaos in Congo or of the solutions to fix a national pension system is
probably even harder that communicating the emotion triggered by cherry-
trees blossoming. If journalists working for web-sites or free newspapers may
have enhanced the old journalistic art of explaining complex facts in a
limited time or space, there are objective limits even to the most gifted
practice of condensing facts and explanations. In French the same adjective
“clair” expresses the idea of something bright or unambiguous, but also the
idea of something lacking of depth or content (a thin soup = une soupe
claire). Compact format journalism cannot really supply to its reader both a
compact and edible summary of the news that one can read during a short
tube journey, and an in-depth approach. The question of depth goes beyond
the idea of complex or multi causal explanations. Depth could also mean
portraying characters with some precision, showing the practical impact of a
policy choice on its targets, brushing the cityscapes or highlighting the
material background of an event. One could argue that if the audience
wishes more explanations, it could search it in specialised media or
websites. But would such a quest often be done? And what would one think
of a teacher or friend who would claim as a virtue of being always simplistic?
The final limit of the new style of news-coverage could be linked to the
question of pleasure. The use of narratives, the art of storytelling are not
sins or treasons for the journalistic practice. Writing or telling seamless,
attractive and illuminating stories is a core skill to transform facts into news.
Darnton gives (1975) an illuminating example of this process when he writes
on his early experience as a reporter, how he learned to produce a colourful
story from the routine fact of a stolen bike. Reading the news is also an
opportunity to enjoy stories, to discover unknown social worlds, to combine
the understanding of the “true” world with an effortless trip in a narrative
flow. Is it possible to provide such gratifications with the new press and
media templates? One of the great contributions of the “reception studies”
has been to provide the empirical proof of the huge variety of receptions,
uses and gratifications of the media messages. Claiming that there is one
best way to satisfy all news consumers has no sense. The feeling of keeping
in touch with the world at the cost of ten to twenty minutes of reading a free
newspaper or browsing at a screen can be gratifying. But Proust’s quotation
suggests other pleasures. Are such “voluptuous” readings the privilege of a
leisure-class of highly educated readers? Or are just such effects beyond the
reach of 1800 signs papers dressed in the straightjacket of a vocabulary
impoverished by the obsession of simplicity?
Rehabilitating the Art of Narrative Reporting
The current trends in journalism are paradoxically devaluating some of
the strongest and most peculiar resources of the profession. Fighting against
screens with the resources of the screen is a battle which can only be lost.
Journalism has accumulated a huge legacy of skills in investigation and data
collecting, in fact checking and news processing. Its spirit is also
transforming facts into attractive stories. To use a phrase borrowed to the
vocabulary of economics, journalists should use their “comparative

advantages”. What can journalists do better than most of their news-
producing competitors? As long as they have time and money enough, they
usually make better investigations than most of bloggers and amateurs, as
they would probably have accumulated a network of connections with
sources, skills for data gathering and fact-checking. Computers and mobile
phones allow access to many sources and data. But traditional “legwork”
remains one of the bases of journalistic practice to meet and question actors
and authorities, to gain a practical knowledge of the places and
atmospheres. Conover writes, in his splendid reporting on the lives of illegal
Mexican farm-workers in the USA:
“the truly meaningful things about a people are not learned by
conducting an interview, gathering statistics or watching them on
the news, but by going out and living with them. To get to know the
Mexicans you need to speak their language, be willing to put up
with living conditions less comfortable than our own…” (1987,
xviii).
Conversely it is rare to see such activities developed by most of those who
claim to the position of news-producers on the web. They are recycling and
commenting facts, often rumours, rarely producing first hand reports.
Journalism is also a narrative art. The beliefs concerning the shrinking
and rapidly collapsing attention levels of audiences, the processing-power of
computer graphic to digest in graphs or maps complex data have converged
to develop innovations in brevity. The style – if any- of modern journalism
appears as the narrative equivalent of the skills of the Jivaro head-shrinkers.
Such competence is useful, but the art of reporting has an opposite
dimension. It means using the narrative dimension of the “once upon a
time…” It means bringing audiences in hidden, unknown or surprising
places and finding the words to express their peculiarities. Such challenges
can hardly be faced using only the few hundred words of greyish, simple and
basic vocabulary which are supposed to be the limit of audiences’ linguistic
abilities. Telling news as (true) stories also means organising a cast of
characters, structuring a plot, mobilising audiences in a subtle use of the
events and surprises in which lives are enfolded and unfold. Such a
narrative journalism is in a structural opposition to the current trends of the
profession. It values legwork and investigation when journalism is more and
more an art of processing data supplied by official sources. It claims space to
develop stories when the dominant pattern is to process many facts into
small formats. It borrows from literature its writing techniques, from social
sciences their investigative tools and interpretive methodologies when
narrative in contemporary journalism has surrendered to the news-flash,
and in-depth investigation to speed.
Describing this opposition is not building a great divide. A journalism
helping its audience to behave like better informed consumers, a journalism
mobilising computer-graphics explaining the why of an electoral landslide, of
a financial bubble is praiseworthy. Conversely narrative reporting can also
be crammed-up with clichés and prejudices, when an editor tells to a young
reporter covering urban riots: “Find me a black, a beur and a dealer”
[3](Champagne, 1993) as if this trio encapsulated the life of a city he never
visited. Narrative reporting remains however a major opportunity for

tomorrow’s reporting as it creates a space where professionalism makes a
huge difference with the “bricolage” of the continuum of “pro-amateur” news
producers. Journalism as always been a practice of the ephemeral; it slips
into the disposable. Longer narrative reporting could produce a “lasting
journalism”. If the phrase sounds like an oxymoron, let’s speak of
“legitimate” (Bourdieu, 1979) or “interpretive” journalism. Why is it possible
to find books collecting the papers –sometimes half a century old or more-
from Joan Didion, Vassili Grossman, or Ryscard Kapuscinski, from Albert
Londres, and Tom Wolfe? Why is it possible still enjoying them? Sometimes
it comes from their style. More often they give the feeling to make sense of
issues, trends and events which remain meaningful. And which journalism
successfully faces this test of time? Almost always texts belonging to
narrative, investigative and explanatory reporting….
Pleading for this alternative style of journalism may look like a
blueprint produced by an academic far from the life of newsrooms. Eppur, si
muove ! Robert Boynton (2005) has coined as « new-new journalism » the
development of such reporting in the USA. A whole generation of journalists
is exploring a style of reporting indebted to the “new journalism” of the
sixties, though less narcissistic in its mood, less pyrotechnic in its writing.
This generation of journalists can be defined by four common denominators.
They practice long and in-depth investigation, sometimes risky ones: twelve
years of relationship to a poor Puerto-Rican family for Adrian Nicole Leblanc
(2004), eight years following and deciphering a complex case in a
Massachusetts court for Harr (1995). Junger (2010) shared during months
the experience of an infantry platoon in Afghanistan. The phrase “immersion
journalism” used by some of these reporters is illuminating. A second feature
of this journalism is the aim to combine the objectivity, the factuality of the
scenes and actions and the greatest attention to the subjective dimension of
the experience and feelings of the actors of the events. To reach this goal –
and here is a third peculiarity- many journalists are mobilising tools
borrowed from social sciences. Many among them have studied history,
anthropology, sociology. They import techniques of data gathering, the use of
scientific journals and all that ethnographic or sociological methods of
interview and observation can bring for understanding groups sometimes
socially very different from the investigator. Let’s mention finally that this
reporting, often combining magazine papers into books, is deeply narrative.
It tells stories, it solves puzzles. It transforms its readers into travellers in
the backstage of the social world. It organizes its narratives around a
sophisticated cast of characters. Such style of reporting is not surprising in
the USA where it mobilises a tradition (the muckrakers, Liebling and
Mitchell, the “new journalism”) and a whole range of magazines as niches for
such contributions. What is more promising is the fact that such journalism
develops in many countries (Bak & Reynolds, 2011). The Belarus Svetlana
Alexievitch wrote deeply moving reports on Chernobyl or on the Soviet
veterans from the Afghanistan war (1992). This journalism finds an echo in
India with the reports of Arundhati Roy (2011) on the policy of dam building
and its ecological impact, or about the Naxalite movement. In France, where
this style of journalism seemed to belong to the past, it gained a new life with
the quarterly magazine XXI selling after five years of existence more than

60 000 copies of each issue, when no one among the specialists in the press
business would have bet on its survival beyond two years. The report of
Florence Aubenas (2011), telling her immersion among the poor and
precarious night-cleaners became a best-selling non fiction book.
Redefining Journalistic Training and Mediums
If a more narrative, more investigative reporting is one of the future of
journalism, which are the implications of this opportunity?
The first ones are concerning the training of future journalists. In
times of crisis schools of journalism have been competing to supply the
newsrooms with the most “operational”, “efficient” newcomers. A good
graduate from a journalism school must be able to produce immediately
material publishable without too much editing, he/she must be able to work
for very different media. This training policy focused on the practical skills,
the use of computer software, an art of hyper compact-writing. But the other
side of the attention to these useful skills has often been new forms of anti-
intellectualism. Ruffin’s testimony (2003) on his experience in one of the best
French journalist schools – where the library could be closed for months
without triggering any protest- gives a chilling example of these trends.
Reluctance for “theory” would be understandable if the suggestions were to
transform journalists into surrogate sociologists, or to cram-up reports with
quotes from Weber or concepts from Parsons. But a clever journalistic use of
social sciences would be something else.
Firstly ethnography and sociology supply a rich tool-kit of methods for
observation, investigation, reflexive understanding of what is trustworthy or
not in the data collected by legwork. Secondly they provide interpretive tools.
Theories may be use to intimidate or to bore audiences. They can also
suggest the schemes which would allow making sense, in simple words, of
complex causal relations. A social science training also teaches how to do
data-mining on the web, where to locate real specialists on many social
issues. It allows too to gain a panoptic vision of scientific journals and
publishers where the most trustworthy and recent state of knowledge can be
found. Lawrence Wright explains that he starts all his investigative work by
research on Lexis-Nexis; Eric Schlosser argues “My research process is to
start reading secondary sources. Then I move to academic journal articles.
Then I move to trade journals. I don’t call anyone up until I’ve done an
enormous amount of reading on the subject” (Boynton, 441-2, 350).
Last but not least, the social sciences – “reception studies” would be
pivotal here- can help understanding the audience expectations, their
perception logics. Marketing services behave as if ventriloquists of audiences’
wishes, even if their real knowledge of these expectations is dubious
(Brandewinder, 2009). One of the problems of journalism may have be to
pursue after an imaginary public. Anticipating the supposed reader’s desires
is too often an invitation to restrain ambitions, to think of audience in a kind
of newsroom “third person effect” where audiences are “less”: less clever, less
curious, less reflexive that the news-professionals. Being a good editor
means thus providing the audience with shorter papers, simpler analysis

and entertaining newsbeat…a policy which is more efficient at cutting costs
than boosting audiences. Conversely the few studies exploring the reception
of narrative reporting in the press (Johnston & Graham, 2012), and media
(Machill, Löhler and Waldhauser, 2007) suggest that such framing improves
understanding and memorization of news. Policies can be explored from the
point of view of those who experience their impacts. Hot issues like
immigration, the underground drug business… but also the worlds of
finance or environmental issues could be, have been treated in readable and
exciting ways by the “new-new” journalism. Would it be “populist” suggesting
that providing working class audiences with stories which speak of their
lives, mirror their experience with empathy and respect could be – even from
a businesslike point of view- a strategy able to regain sales and attention?
Another redefinition of the journalists training should be re-evaluating
writing abilities. Expressing much in a few words must remains part of the
journalist skills. But the sad state of journalism may also come from the
devaluation of other styles of writing, from the divorce with literature as a
proof of seriousness and readability. If the real strength of journalism were
to be “un-pure”, always blurring its frontiers with social science and
literature? Telling stories and portraying, inventing illuminating metaphors
and playing with adjectives, combining empathy and distance to make sense
of the beliefs and behaviours of those different from the reader are also the
arts of journalism. Breslin’s interview of the man who dug JFK’s grave,
Londres’ report on the horrors of the Devil’s island French penitentiary or
Wallraf’s undercover investigation on the Turkish Gastarbeiter in the 80’s
Germany- received enormous praise and resonance. Was it because they
were made of short sentences? Or was it thanks to their expressive skills and
narrative qualities?
Considering seriously the future of a narrative journalism invites to
think of its medium. In many of the countries where this journalism has
gained a significant recognition, its main expression comes from magazines
(Granta, The New Yorker, Esquire, XXI). The decreasing importance of youth
in their audience and the choice of Rolling Stone to reduce the length of the
papers have questioned the future of these magazines. Will they survive the
supposed reducing attention span of the new generations (Scherer, 2002)?
This decreasing attention looks more like a myth (Newman, 2010) than a
documented fact. As the global leisure time is not decreasing in developed
countries, the problem is probably different. If the readership of some
magazines crumbles, it is not because long articles are beyond the reach of
internet zombies, but because the supply of leisure and cultural activities is
endlessly increasing, fragmenting audiences, as is the case for TV networks.
The right media strategy is thus to multiply the niches, mediums and
templates to extend the supply of narrative reporting. Magazine reports
would find new readers when available on the screens of iPads and tablets.
Books are not the first medium that common sense links to
journalism. And moreover a significant number of major contributions to
narrative journalism have reached a large audience as books. In the USA a
book version is quite often the result of the upgrading and rewriting of
reports originally published in magazines. In France, prominent contributors

to this style of reporting have made the choice to go straight to the books.
Such is the case of Jean Hatzfeld for a much praised trilogy on the Rwandan
genocide. Significantly, all the French magazines publishing this style of
reporting (XXI, Feuilleton, Muse) are only sold in bookshops, not with the
press, suggesting the hybrid status of these publications, sometimes
identified as “mooks”. Combining –not converging- media could also mean,
as Junger did during his fieldwork in Afghanistan, working with a
cameraman and shooting a video film, producing then papers, a book and a
documentary movie. Narrative journalism combines with very different
templates. Sunday supplements, magazines and books will host the longest
articles. But expressing the results of in depth investigations with attractive
narrative style fits as well with the full page portrait, the double page report
which takes a growing importance in the editorial menu of many dailies or
web sites.
The future of journalism has no “one best way”. As Downie and
Schudson (2009) suggest, multiple initiatives and a strong journalistic
imagination would be needed. Developing investigative-narrative journalism
is one of the opportunities for renewal. The objection is often that it could
only be a small niche activity, produced for a limited and culturally
privileged audience. It would be foolhardy to suggest that this journalism
would be tomorrow the core output of the profession. But the elitist objection
may say more about those who express it that on the potential of this
journalism. “Lowbrow” audiences can enjoy stories echoing their
experiences, without condescension. And if the readership of more literary
journalism is usually richer in cultural capital …one of the trends of
modernity is precisely the growing number of people reaching higher
education. This more educated audience enjoys sophisticated narratives,
concern for social issues. Many TV series produced by HBO (Game of
Thrones…) have complex interwoven narrative structures, their collection of
characters is much bigger that in the 60’s series. Some (The Wire, The
Newsroom) develop quasi-sociological explorations of social worlds.
They are complicated and long, they combine investigation and
narrative. Could it be possible to see in such peculiarities a reason of -not a
hindrance to- their success ?
Erik Neveu
Professor of Political Science.
Centre de Recherche sur l’Action Politique en Europe. CNRS. Rennes.
erik.neveu@sciencespo-rennes.fr
http://www.crape.univ-rennes1.fr/membres/neveu_erik.htm

Notes
1 Regional newspapers are cheaper. “Ouest-France” costs “only”
0,85 euros…still much more than Bild, Daily Mirror or the Norvegian VG.
2 Talese did it in his masterpiece portrayal of Sinatra (“Franck
Sinatra has a cold”) but after weeks of investigation and direct observation of
his target.
3 The French word for someone with arabic ethnic origins.
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