“I remember, I saw, I knew”: Journalists’ use of first-person storytelling in award-winning podcasts
Description
This study focuses on first-person storytelling in six award-winning podcast series. Using a grounded theory approach, this analysis explores the specific language used in first-person journalistic storytelling, how they are used as journalistic narrative devices, and how first-person journalism subverts the objectivity norms of institutional journalism, specifically the norm of detachment. This study’s analysis found that first-person storytelling in journalism uses a multitude of journalistic devices, such as eye-witnessing and retrospective reporting, but uses journalists’ lived experiences to enact these devices. Additionally, first-person journalism lies along a spectrum of subjectivity that is diverse. By investigating podcasting’s narrative techniques and its positioning within the process of collective memory, this research sheds light on podcasting’s role in amplifying marginalized voices, examining complex social justice issues, and shaping journalism culture.
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Using a grounded theory methodology approach for audio-visual texts (Corbin & Strauss, 1990; Figueroa, 2008), this study examined a sample of first-place, award-winning podcasts. The study used a purposive sample of journalism awards that were awarded in 2022 as a sampling frame, including the Pulitzer Prize in Audio Reporting, Peabody Awards for Podcast & Radio, Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) Sigma Delta Chi Awards for Narrative Radio and Podcast Documentaries, and the Online Journalism Awards for Excellence in Audio Digital Storytelling, Limited Series. The resulting sample included six podcasts, 32 episodes, and about 1,415 minutes of audio data (Table 1). As the first step in this study, the podcasts were listened to in succession before coding began. This provided the opportunity for a “long preliminary soak” to holistically absorb the narrative and context of each podcast series (Hall, 1975, p. 15). During this preliminary soak, voice memos were kept identifying “impressionistic notes” (Figueroa, 2008, p. 8, quoting van Dijk, 1991). Following the audio absorption and memo recording phase, I began coding each episode transcript using Atlas.ti software using individual sentences as the unit of analysis. The coding was conducted in three phases using Corbin and Strauss’s (1990) procedures for grounded theory analysis. The first coding iteration consisted of open coding guided by the generative question: What first-person language is used in each episode? For this phase, first-person pronouns (e.g., I, me, my, we, us, ours) were used as signposts for which sentences to include in the coding sample. Sentences that used first-person pronouns but acted as filler words, a part of recorded dialogue, or were used as paraphrasing of interviewees’ quotes were discarded from the sample. Verb tenses were also noted during this phase. The second coding phase conducted axial coding using the generative question: How is this language used as a journalistic storytelling device? For this phase, initial codes were generated to begin identifying their functionality as a journalistic narrative device, meaning what purpose they served in the overall storytelling structure. For example, was the journalist engaging in reporting of facts in this particular sentence, or in recollection of a memory, or both? Finally, the third phase conducted selective coding using the generative question: What discursive statements (either implicit or explicit) are these devices making about the objectivity paradigm? This final phase was used to critically examine if and how these devices adhered to or subverted objectivity norms.