Interpretive Journalism
Authors: Salgado Susana 
Published: May 2019

Interpretive journalism has been defined in extant research as a style of news reporting that is opposed to descriptive journalism. Rather than simply describing what happened and providing source-driven and fact-focused accounts, it provides journalistic interpretation and analysis through explanations, evaluations, contextualizations, or speculations by the journalist. The prominent role of the journalist in news coverage is linked to the disbelief in value-free facts and in interest-free sources, thus making it necessary to explain the context and interpret the relevance and impact of facts, events, and statements. Interpretive journalism is thus a style of reporting centered on the journalist to the detriment of sources, which empowers journalists, by giving them more control over content, through the selection of themes and the possibility of adding new meaning to news stories. This style of journalism thus potentially impacts on the purpose and tone of news reports as well. It can take the form of signaled comment and analysis or of journalistic interpretations intermixed in straight news stories. The latter has been pointed as problematic, as it gives the journalist tools to induce certain ideas or evaluations in the audiences’ mind, without explicitly warning that those are the journalist’s own interpretations. Interpretive journalism has been often the subject of normative evaluations. It still is controversial in the journalistic cultures that are most committed to objectivity in guiding news narratives, and in other cases it is interconnected with the role of journalism as the fourth estate and its contribution to the healthy functioning of democracy. Some critics consider that it introduces subjectivity and partisan (and other) bias in the news reports, which can, for this reason, discredit journalists and journalism itself. Despite the criticism, interpretive journalism is not recent; in fact, it is rooted in the inception of journalism itself. Newsweekly journalism is the most acknowledged and one of the earliest forms of interpretive journalism: it is substantiated by the fact that daily news media provide the facts, and the purpose of weekly news media outlets is to provide the interpretation of those facts. But interpretive journalism can be found in any type of media outlet. The idea that journalists should not only report the increasingly complex world, but also explain and interpret it, has become relatively widespread today, especially given the impact of the Internet on the amount of news media outlets and information available stemming from all kinds of sources, including shady sources. In fact, in today’s complex media environments, the relevance of interpretive journalism may increase, in the sense that it could be regarded as journalists’ important comparative advantage, when any person can now publish/post information. In research, interpretive journalism has been the subject of multiple approaches and it has been mixed with other concepts. Given that these other concepts always attribute a central role to the journalist and to her/his interpretations, interpretive journalism could be viewed as an umbrella concept.