Reportage

Reportage sometimes refers to the total body of media coverage of a particular topic or event, including news reporting and analysis: "the extensive reportage of recent events in x." This is typically used in discussions of the media's general tone or angle or other collective characteristics.

Reportage is also a term for an eye-witness genre of journalism: an individual journalist's report of news, especially when witnessed firsthand, distributed through the media. This style of reporting is often characterized by travel and careful observation.

Literary reportage is the art of blending documentary, reportage-style observations, with personal experience, perception, and anecdotal evidence, in a non-fiction form of literature. This is perhaps more commonly called creative nonfiction and is closely related to New Journalism. The prose of such reporting tends to be more polished and longer than in newspaper articles.

Etymology

All forms have a common route, being adapted into English in the late 19th century from the French word of the same spelling.

Examples of Reportage in photography

Reportage styles of photography can be applied outside of photojournalism. People who have worked in the journalistic profession sometimes move their skills acquired into other areas of photography such as weddings or portraits, pets and animals or event photography.

Reportage in China

Reportage found a major exponent in the Chinese writer Liu Binyan, as exemplified in his 1979 work, People or Monsters.

Reportage in Popular Culture

Truman Capote's character discusses reportage with Harper Lee's character in the film Infamous

See also

• Reportage Festival, Sydney
• creative nonfiction
• New Journalism
• Photojournalism
• Report
• Reporter

External links

• Lettre Ulysses Award for the Art of Reportage
• HERODOTUS AND THE ART OF NOTICING Ryszard Kapuściński emphasises Herodotus's ambition to understand the world, and claims his as the originator of the genre of reportage.