Highlighting and downplaying subjectivity through ethos construction: Personal journalism as a pluriform epistemic practice

Individual experiences have gained more prominence as a reliable alternative source of knowledge in the last decades. This personalization of knowledge has far-reaching consequences for journalism. This article studies the rise of personal journalism, in which journalists play a central role in the stories they write, and analyses how this impacts the epistemological underpinning of journalism. Through a quantitative content analysis of tabloid and quality newspapers between 1999 and 2019, we show that personal journalism has increased. Subsequently, through a qualitative analysis we examine how journalists build on and adjust existing epistemic regimes to construct their ethos, the strategic self-image of the journalist in the text. We argue that ethos is central to the legitimization strategy of personal journalism and discern two ethos constructions: highlighting subjectivity and downplaying subjectivity. While the former builds on subjective epistemic regimes, in the latter subjective and traditional understandings of journalism intersect. These results urge journalism studies to rethink subjectivity beyond its status as undetermined counterparts to objectivity. Rather, they show the multifaceted manifestations of personalization and its intricate intertwining with objectivity.