EPISTEMIC PLURALITIES: a critique of the notion of journalists as an interpretative community

Abstract

This paper focuses on a critical reading of the concept of journalism as a field constituted by a single interpretive community, as proposed by Barbie Zelizer and Nelson Traquina. By pondering about the implications of using Stanley Fish's original notion of interpretive communities in Journalism Studies, the article revisits the terms of his proposition and then proposes clues foridentifying a multitude of interpretive communities in journalism. Then, we focus on the epistemic singularities of literary journalism and its own diversity of interpretive communities. We conclude that the notion of diversity in  interpretive communities of journalists is useful for understanding journalism practices that are divergent or even disruptive in relation to hegemonic notions of journalism that are assumed to be natural under the perspective of objectivity.