ABSTRACT
In an age of mass media, a new and complex phenomenology reigns - Rod Hart Ethnographers, wrote Philipsen, must be good scientists and storytellers. The emergence of civic journalism has led to an unanticipated need for triangulation and an emphasis on qualitative approaches to newsgathering. Interview methods, for instance, have become much more complex, time-consuming, and context-dependent in an effort to generate relevant, in-depth stories from the local citizenry. Sophisticated interviewing methods that require professional-academic partnerships are finding their way into television newsrooms especially during election coverage. The Interdisciplinary Communication Research Institute at Wichita State University devised a live debate tracker, a mobile automated response testing instrument (MARTI) that KSNW, the NBC affiliate, used in covering the 2000 presidential debates. While media coverage of HIV was being documented in terms of quantitative research, additional study explored the undercurrent of frustration and fear expressed by marginalized publics. Qualitative essays in the Elwood anthology addressed these concerns.
