Reportage:: Methodology of Literary Journalism

Raúl Hernando Osorio Vargas
E ssa y
REPORTAGE:
methodology of literary journalism
RAÚL HERNANDO OSORIO VARGAS

Copyright © 2018
SBPjor / Associação Universidad de Antioquia – Antioquia, Colombia
Brasileira de Pesquisa- ORCID: 0000-0002-8286-7649
dores em Jornalismo
DOI: 10.25200/BJR.v14n3.2018.1124
ABSTRACT – I sustain in my book El reportaje como metodologia del periodismo: una

polifonia de saberes (Reportage as the methodology of journalism: polyphony of knowledge),
(Osorio, 2017), that journalism leads, guides, interprets, explains, teaches and above all tries
deeply to understand the world and its running; thus its essence is freedom of thought,
expression and social dialogue or conversation to set in place and to enhance consensus and
democratic participation. In this process, journalism shows and enlightens ways (methods)
through reportage, which has been very much so studied as a journalist genre around the
world; countless books and articles have been published about it and several universities
have granted PhD titles for theses written about it. The North American and European
bibliography on it is abundant - which has been taken in consideration at this research -
and widely known; but little is known of what has been done in our continent. Therefore,
in this book I put in perspective two major examples: Brazil and Colombia. Nevertheless,
I must emphasize that when this subject is addressed, it is done so through the lens of
journalistic genres, but not under the dimension of the methodology of journalism, which
has been away from the eyes of theoreticians, scholars and researchers. In this sense, my
book is an epistemological turn, as it is innovative and pioneer for contributing with another
vision, which studies, analyses and proposes reportage as the methodology of journalism, by
presenting some findings and by opening new theoretical perspectives in literary journalism.
Key words: Journalism. Reportage. Methodology. Interview. Method.
REPORTAGEM: metodologia do jornalismo literário
RESUMO – No meu livro A reportagem como como metodologia do jornalismo. Uma polifonia
de saberes (Osorio, 2017), sustento que o jornalismo orienta, guia, interpreta, explica,
ensina e acima de tudo tenta compreender em profundidade o mundo e suas ações; por isso
sua essência é a liberdade de pensamento, de expressão e de diálogo social ou conversação
para pôr em comum e fortalecer o consenso e a participação democrática. Nesse processo,
o jornalismo mostra e ilumina caminhos (métodos) através da reportagem, que em todo
o mundo tem sido amplamente estudada como gênero jornalístico; e em torno dela tem-
se publicado numerosos livros e artigos, e em diversas universidades foram concedidos
títulos de doutorado por teses feitas sobre o tema. A bibliografia europeia e americana que
tratam o assunto é abundante –e que tive em conta para esta pesquisa–, é de conhecimento
geral; mas o que é produzido em nosso próprio continente é desconhecido. Por isso, nesse
720 Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

(CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). DOI: 10.25200/BJR.v14n3.2018.1124
REPORTAGE: METHODOLOGY OF LITERARY JOURNALISM
livro, concentrei-me em dois exemplos importantes: o que foi feito no Brasil e na Colômbia.
No entanto, devo reiterar que, quando o tema proposto é abordado, se faz desde a ótica
dos gêneros jornalísticos, mas não sob a dimensão da metodologia do jornalismo, que tem
estado oculta as miradas dos estudiosos, teóricos e acadêmicos. Neste sentido, o meu livro
constitui um giro epistemológico, pois é inovador e pioneiro ao contribuir com outra visão,
que estuda, analisa e propõe a reportagem como metodologia do jornalismo, ao mostrar
algumas descobertas e abrir novas perspectivas sobre as teorias do jornalismo literário.
Palavras chave: Jornalismo. Reportagem. Metodologia. Entrevista. Método.
REPORTAJE: metodología del periodismo literario
RESUMEN – En mi libro El reportaje como metodología del periodismo. Una polifonía de

saberes (Osorio, 2017), sostengo que el periodismo orienta, guía, interpreta, explica, enseña
y sobre todo intenta comprender en profundidad el mundo y su accionar; por eso su esencia
es la libertad de pensamiento, de expresión y de diálogo social o conversación para poner en
común y fortalecer el consenso y la participación democrática. En ese proceso, el periodismo
muestra e ilumina caminos (métodos) a través del reportaje, que en todo el mundo ha
sido muy estudiado como género periodístico; en torno a él se han publicado numerosos
libros y artículos, y en diversas universidades se han otorgado títulos de doctorado por
tesis realizadas sobre el tema. La bibliografía europea y estadounidense al respecto, que
es abundante –y que he tenido en cuenta para esta investigación–, es de conocimiento
general; pero se desconoce lo producido en nuestro propio continente. Por eso en ese libro
me centré en dos ejemplos importantes: lo hecho en Brasil y en Colombia. Sin embargo,
debo reiterar que cuando se aborda el tema propuesto, se hace desde la óptica de los
géneros periodísticos pero no bajo la dimensión de la metodología del periodismo, que ha
estado oculta a las miradas de estudiosos, teóricos y académicos. En este sentido, mi libro
constituye un giro epistemológico, pues es novedoso y pionero al contribuir con otra visión,
que estudia, analiza y propone el reportaje como metodología del periodismo, al mostrar
algunos hallazgos y al abrir nuevas perspectivas sobre las teorías del periodismo literario.
Palabras clave: Periodismo. Reportaje. Metodología. Entrevista. Método.
1. Introduction
This paper works with the hipothesis according to which

reportage is the key engine of an epistemology of literary journalism.
Here, the notion of reportage is built from its etimology, its early
years as a narrative form and its consolidation through the immediate
experience of the reporter that became a historian and a narrator of
multiple times. Reportage is the methodology of journalism, and the
search for human comprehension is the energy source that keeps it alive,
its means for producing meaning and knowledge. The transformations
of reportage in several periods show the manifold tendences that are
combined in literary journalism, which generates meaning as it faces
with severity and consistency of investigation the many problems of the
world. When they analyse the phenomena of the lived, experienced and
shared reality, literary journalists amalgamize reportage, essay, image
and sound as in a kind of film editing that conceives lore (epistemology)
Braz. journal. res., - ISSN 1981-9854 - Brasília -DF - Vol. 14 - N. 3 - December - 2018. 720-739 721
and transcendent analysis of the contemporary sociopolitical realities

and cultural discourses. Reportage is a methodology that was born
with press journalism but has evolved independently since it cannot
exist without continuously interacting and communicating with others,
with the distinct voices of society. Reporting is still supported in online
journalism, in a both global and local scope, by using the ICT in favour
of a professional activity of high quality, in its hipertextual, multimedia
and interactive narratives.
Reportage as a methodology is present in 1.0 Journalism, in which
contents are transported from the print outlet to the digital website; in the
hybrid 2.0 Journalism, in which there is native hipertextual, interactive
and multimedia narrative content; in 3.0 journalism, in which receivers
intervene in the message and the prosumer (producer and consumer)
emerges along with citizen journalism, blogs, original content and a
form of interactivity that brings more participation – in this model there
is also semantic web, which main service is interconnecting many kinds
of knowledge. Finally, reportage as a methodology is present in the
movement towards 4.0 Journalism, which is associated with the notion
of webOS, a platform that interacts with the users via the web browser
and does not depend on the operational system. Furthermore, it is
present in virtual reality, resulting in immersive journalism. Nonny de
la Peña, a pioneer in this kind of reporting that submerge people in the
slums of Los Angeles or in the hardships of life in contemporary Aleppo,
had her works backed by Google, Associated Press and Tribeca Film
Institue, and was awarded in the Sundance Film Festival. De la Peña, in
many of her videos uploaded to Youtube, states that the advancement of
virtual reality is unstoppable and will be essential to journalism. She says
journalists will quickly realize that virtual reality has a unique capacity
for situating spectators in the scene of an event instead of looking at it
from the outside, and this powerful form seduces them through their
feelings. She explains that RV adapts itself in special to a king of story
in which significative events take place in a specific scenery, and that
people will quickly learn to say: “this should be told in RV”. However,
she warns us that we should be careful when enacting such scenes
and should stick to major journalistic practices2. This means that the
methodology of reportage is a systematic cross-referencing between the
evolution of literary journalism through the many times it was practiced
and its transdisciplinarity, its ethics and its dialogue with different
methods and lores of Humanities, Social Sciences and Literature.

Literature is a lifeform because life, just like Literature, is

dissonant, ambiguous and ambivalent. In Literature there are
no clear and distinct ideas, there are no principles that tell us
how one must read, the correct way of reading. In Literature,
just like in life, there are no unequivocal sign that show us the
correct interpretation (Mèlich, 2015, p. 13-14).
The history of literary journalism is full of contacts and

borrowings. Thus, this paper has a wide and complex agenda
that comprehends the process of journalistic production and its
construction in language through different forms, structures and
times; qualitative investigation, methodology and epistemology;
the history of journalists and of journalism. My focus is the multiple
relations of literary journalism with culture, memory social theories,
discourse and technologies, fields that were approached and analyzed
in Iberoamerica and throughout the world.
Since Tobias Peucer’s first presentation of a PhD Dissertation in
Journalism in 1690, in Germany, international literary journalism studies
have experienced important developments as a form of knowledge,
professional practice, social rethorics and narrative in journalism
theories, narrative theories and literature theories. In literary journalism’s
journey through tradition and modernity, the methodology of reportage
is indissolubly attached to a perception of human events.
The epistemological investigation of reportage may be
summarized in an action, in a way of acting: the act of reporting.
However, one must look for the roots and developments of that
creative proccess since the origins of the word. In order to do that,
we outline what is reportage, what is the act of reporting, and how
journalists have acted as narrators and hommes de lettres. Also,
in order to propose a philosophy of reportage, we resort to the
borrowings it made from other fields of human knowledge. Here
the indispensable value of the senses in essential. By constrasting
the texts of pioneers of reportage with the later tradition and other
voices of Latin America we then find how reporting has consolidated
its methodology. In the light of this philosophy of authorial reportage,
we hae the possibility of accessing the creative process, the new
forms of reporting, the audacity, the renovation and the ethical-
aesthetic-poetic function of reportage, in which texts it is possible
to see, read, observe, interrogate and theorize, in order to reach the
conclusion that reportage is the methodology of literary journalism.

This theoretical proposition demands interview as the
fundamental tool of literary journalism. Reportage is always done
based on the flagrant statements that surface in a dialogical system

of orality and writing and investigation. Opening huge posibilities
in transcultural journalism, we offer up a question: what is the
proccess through which a reporter walks in the path of constructing
knowledge? The old layer of literary journalists, just lile the new
generations, must walk through the paths of memory in synchony
with the world, focusing on our local realities but not forgetting
the universal ones, using without any prejudice open methods that
allow them to reconstruct and recreat the history of everyday life.
From this everyday life the language of narrators emerge. Is there
an ideal reportage? Or are the many propositions of journalists and
journalisms that assume new configurations woven by the complex
world of multiple voices in dialogue?
In order to study reportage, one must have in mind the
trends of the practice. It is very important to review the dialogue
between the past and those who transform the traditional ways of
reporting, despite not being acknowledged by mass media for being
too young. Albeit reportage is a creative genre, open to the realities
it investigates, it is not fiction, and has been converted into the
methodology of past, present and future journalism, writing even
small new chapters in contemporary history. However, in order to
evolve, it has the need to find new methods, new paths and ways of
looking at the world.
The investigation we have made considers the existence of
social reality as the basis to contextualize the narrative in reportage. It
is not dead: on the contrary, it is only being born. The Humane Being, in
its fantastic journey, is narrating its traces, its lost footprints that were
recovered by new generations who are surprised by the trajectories
of their ancestors. The old, the new, tradition, rebellion, turmoil and
tranquility are in conversation in order to transform life into a narrative
of voices and achievements available to the generations to come.
However, how is such a narrative process developed, how do reporters
report? Through a critical revision of the worldview that aleays urges
us to learn with the generosity, the empathy and the comprehension of
the Humane Being, since the insular notion of “human being” is dying
in the present days, and in the age of open, multidimensional and
complex theory the Humane Being is revived, since humane qualities
and humankind are bigger than modernity.
The humanization of the relation between subjects, through the
method of interview, contemporaneity in its polyphony and reportage

as the place of collective memory that allows for the reporter to

intervene in society. I must stress that, when I speak of humanization,
I make a reference to the process through which typical features of the
Humane Being are acquired. There is a difference that is fundamental
to journalism: seeing something means a visual activity, a swift action,
while looking at something is a slow, long action that is conscious of
some degree of analysis. The possibilities of that dimension and of
life constitute the genesis and the development of this proposal. The
paths we have walked show the open routes for narrating the human
events and achievements of our time and for building a transcultural,
convergent, transmedia, contemporary literary journalism.
Such a method must have an ethical definition (the
humanization of the contemporary discourse); the construction of
mediator reports (orality) illuminated by the aesthetic investigation
(transmedia-convergent-literary-reportage), turning literary
journalism into an activity that generates forms of knowledge, in
which center stands the Humane Being.

2. Methodology
As widely known, methodology is the science of methods, or

the set of methods used in a research, composed by two main kinds:
qualitative and quantitative, which on their turn comprehend their own
sets of methods. In tradition, there are three main groups: historical,
interpretative-descriptive and experimental methods. On the other hand,
there are groups of methods: in Humanities, in Social Sciences, in Arts.
Through the means of reporting3 the methodology of
journalism (reportage) has historically contributed to the development
of investigation with its similarities and differences, appropriations
and contributions to the other forms of research in Humanities and
Social Sciences, in a process of dialogue, interdisciplinarity and
transdisciplinarity. However, in order to reach this point, we must
recall its origin and the central activity in journalistic eorl.
The Latin verb reportatre means to transmit, to discouver, to
announce, to bring news. Re is a prefix that designates a movement
backwards – here Is the past. Portare means to carry something – here
is the present walking towards the future. Repor means the act of
reloading, reconstituting. Thus, reporting means (re)turn round oneself.
The journalist porte la parole (carries the word) in order to bring us back.
À portée de la voix (within reach of the voice) an ancient

word, reportare, becomes a new expression: news report in English,
reportage in English, Italian and French, reportaje in Spanish,
reportagem in Portuguese. It carries letters, voice and also life: this
neologism implies hermeneutics, because it is an art of interpretation
and of comprehension; not of sacred texts anymore, but of life itself.
In orderto interpretate, first we need to understsnd and for this we
need to submerge in the Humane Being. The practice of reportage
shelters a passion: the challenge of knowing, discovering and
reporting not only with the brain, but also with the heart, with all
senses, and in multiple times and spaces. This is another method for
living again what has already happened.
The report (narrative and description) was born with the
human being… Sagas, legends, traditions, stories, tales are the
quintessence of peoples and compose the history of the world and
its many kinds of knowledge. The words are with us since always: as
moans, screams, sonority and voice. All of those, first in oral form
and later in written form, tell the story of travel, accumulate and
construct the memory of women and men who do not conform with
losing their lives, trying to convert what is temporary into eternal.
The journalism-related words “reporter” and “gazeteer”
originate from the rapportisti and gazzettani of Venice. Gazzeta was
a small venetian coin worth a sheet of handwritten news that were
sold in shops of that mercantile republic. The menanti, also known as
novellanti, rapportisti or gazzetanti, were professionals from early
Renaissance Italy who offered correspondence services for noblemen
and merchants. In France the men who worte those news sheets were
called nouvellistes or gazettiers (Balle, 1991, p. 74).
The year 1440 marks the beginning of what Marshall McLuhan

calls the “Galaxy of Gutenberg”. Thnaks to the invention of the
moveable-types press, the sheets written by rapportisti have
expanded their reach and influence. The first print papers
had diverse functions: some were limited to offer news in
order to make money for the printers, while others aimed to
publicize new ideas and propose subjects for reflecting upon
sociopolitical reality (Gutiérrez, 2014, p. 1).
Thus, we must go deep into the roots of reportage in order

to demonstrate the elements that compose this methodology of
journalism, and our first approximation focuses on its etimology:
Re-: from the Latin prefix re- that means rebuild, “behind
something”, reflow, denotes intensification. Reload.

Port: from the Latin portāre. Having something with oneself,

or on oneself. To carry, to drive something from a place to another.
Pronominal verb. To act or proceed in a determined manner.
Report: from the Latin reportāre. Transitive verb: to reach,
to achieve, to obtain, to bring or to take. To provide, to transmit, to
communicate, to bring news.
-age: from the French -age and the Occitan and Catalan -atge,
and both from the Latin -atĭcus. A suffix which forms substantives
that mean an action.
This means reportage is the action or the succession of events
and achievements that constitue its argument, its argumentation.
From the ancient suffix -adgo, and the Latin suffix -atĭcus, which means
condition or state. Reportatĭcus or reportadgo, finally reportage… is
not only a journalistic genre, but the very methodology of journalism.
Journalism is a way of acting and practicing. It is what reporters do
in order to develop the process of reporting (news, note, narrative):
the journalist who interviews someone4, the journalist who looks
for news and publicize them through several media. Reportage is a
methodology composed by several methods and techniques – among
the most commumon are observation, participante observation and
interview in the process of experience. Reporting has as its main axis
the first, since it is the medium par excellence to aprehend social
aspects that manifest in experience and to point the proceedings to
collect registers and situations lived in the contexts that are studied.
Through his or her experience the reporter observes reality in order
to participate, and also participates in order to observe.
The rationalist paradigm relegates observation to a
prescientific level, a huge mistake, since observation is a process
consisting of distinct modalities, attitudes and levels of depth
in human knowledge. Observations allow journalists to study
communities from the inside, and this first contact provides a first
approximation to reality by attempting to reach an understanding of
what happens there, attempting to understand the point of view of
the people: to know how they read reality. There are certainly many
ways of observing, but the one that literary journalism traditionally
uses features a flexible an open look at the world. That is the look of
the stroller or flâneur, as called by the French.
3. The infinite search…
The spiral of visions we get from a journey through

cities is fundamental to know the past and to enter a deep
understanding with more complex images from the urban space
– scenes made to dive in the scenery and human conditions–,
the best school for journalists who look for traces of the ancient
and the paths of the present, methods that flow under the ritual
of the expectative of the time that will come through the rescue
of a memory, scenes that come from the street, from the acute
senses 5 of the Humane Being. From the turbulent reality that
becomes another, reporters build their expression, their complex
manifestations assume heterogeneity without renouncing to
universal features that were always present in their way of
being, marking their culture in uncountable variations in order to
become a priviledged vehicle of communication and expression
of feelings.
The narrative reporters who write about cities have built
their methodology through their walks. A good definition of
method is a path – “traveler, there is no path, the path is made by
walking”: this is what journalists do with their inventiveness. This
means meeting the crossings of Latin Americans; of farmers who
moved to cities.
In my book El reportaje como metodología del periodismo
[Reportage as the method of journalism], there is a reading – which
is not complete nor exhaustive – of reportage about cities. There
I have looked for a philosophy of literary journalism and a theory
of reportage as a methodology. In the metaphors, in the ruptures
of those narratives, we finds ways of looking at the world of the
Humane Being. There is the cosmovision, the varied panorama of
the multiplicity of expressions, the diverse speeches of deep popular
roots. A way of expressing the urban feeling that does not dodges
social, cultural and political reality. Here the voices are product and
expression of the city, which subjects and motives range from love
to social injustice. The cultural luggage acquired in the corners of
the streets show us the rural survivors in the space of the city, where
we find the beginning of the management of the poliphony of voices
that, albeit different and diverse, sound together to turn observations
and appreciations into important details that aggregate to the big
themes that determine the lights and shadows of our 21dt Century

cosmovision. Culture stimulates new studies, new readings, new

proposals. The values transmitted by reportage about cities are the
reivindication of culture generated by the inhabitants in their multiple
amalgam. Words point us the horizon: the poor, people with scarce
resources, indians, urban people, simple people; a horizon full of
metaphoric logic, image, love, sense of community, expressive and
possible dialogue.
Reportages always hide something unknown waiting to be
discovered in the millennial search it collects past human times that
are still alive in our memories as cultures in dialogue with our own,
harassed by the need to tell its trajectory to know (and taste) the
silent laws that move us and feel the threads of times. There we find
the struggle for life, the struggle of citizens looking their universal
meaning in the village. The past is in everything. Consecrated roots
in the everyday life, in the search for manners, styles in the secrets
of the light of memory. Poetry and precision while building spaces,
details that illuminate places with the intention of understanding the
space where one lives. The human being in its geography, as defined
by Milton Santos: Geography is the history of space, just like History
is the geography of time
By exploring what the person knows, since everybody has
a chest – albeit there are diverse and complex kinds of memory
– we obtain the diversity of voices and a tone that has a sacred
quality. Thus, this heterogenous sign is inversed, reversed, to
reach our anthropofagy: it its eternally reportage. The myth
of eternal return, the narrative that always return to furrow
through the paths of coexistence between us and the world,
accompanying the different steps of human evolution so that a
new group of narrators emerge with full strength, reinterpreting
and understanding, each in their own manner, the journey of the
hope of the Humane Being.
Reportage is a being in communication. Conversation is
reportage of words, of gestures, of images and of the diverse ways
of communicating. Each in their own form, their own way, nurture
our human dialogues. And through the narrative we find the image
of those who are in need, in a city afflicted by unemployment
and violemnce, but also in a city with its spaces of richness,
development and welfare. And there is the journalist to establish a
dialogue with the city as a human totality, with its diverse prisms,
its multiple speeches.
By describing places and scenes in time methodology-

reportage is characterized as a kind of magical realism. Reality is
magical by itself. There is no novelty in saying this, for the Latin
American novelists have demonstrated this prism of human life
with an ample mark of truth and historical reconstitution, and at
the same time have started with a fine lucid observation in order to
documentate and contextualize the work of the mediator. The heroes
are the true characters of flesh and blood, beings with a deep life,
with a cosmovision of the world. City reporting features freedom
of angle, inverview and investigation. Speech is the tuning for the
journalist to recreate it since his or her point of view; it is his or her
sensibility what provides the rhythm and the tone. It is like a dance
in the age of time.
Reportages about cities are an open space to each person
that contains a universe full of sensibility in which a real dialogue
is established so that we do not get lost in the jungle of globalized
information, where the Humane Being ends up being a number, a
screw, a nut (although the big city is the place and the moment in which
the subjects are confronted with the contemporary world, where the
material life, the intellect and the spirit present a diversity of forms
of change and resistance). City, ways of life of the urban culture,
feverish time of the crowds, loneliness and crisis. City, a privileged
place for participant observation – a method of knowing a different
world born with Sociology in the late 19th and early 20th century,
and which navigates with empathy and astonishment through the
urban ways of life and the entanglements of current society, in which
the psychological profile of the subjects suggests the theme of the
day, a meeting place for the diverse memories and oralities of the
metropolis. Reportage reaches another sensibility, because the city
is its people (Osorio, 2017, p. 94-97) in a methodology to not only
reflect on how the act of reporting is done, but also to enter into the
practice of doing it. Since “life is the story of an unconsciousness
that became real. Everything that reposes in it aspires to become an
event” (Jung, 1986, p. 13).
The Hero’s Journey … in our case, the journey of the anti-
heroes of the city, and in which the dialogue between writing and
orality is also present (Osorio, 2017, p.98). As Cremilda Medina says
(1995, p.8), “more than the talent of some, being able to narrate is
a vital necessity ...” Although in the beginning it was silence. Then
came the family composed of thousands of human beings. A certain

group of families formed an association, which the Greek language

called a fratría6 and the Latin language called a curia7. It was a small
society modeled precisely after the family. The association kept
increasing and several curias or fratrías grouped among themselves
and formed the tribes. The times passed until the tribes saw the need
to associate. On the day that this alliance was celebrated, the ancient
city – which was a confederation – was born. Urban space and city
were not the same thing. The city was the association of families
and tribes. The city was the meeting place, the place of residence,
and, above all, the sanctuary of this association. Today they are
synonymous with a new human order. The reporter walks to know
the construction of this polyphonic fabric, moving and mixing himself
or herself in the city spheres. “Living means creating spheres,” as
Sloterdijk8 told us. Frontier cities, gigantic resonance boxes, located
on the edge of the colonial, the modern and the postmodern, and
scenarios of hybridizations where we stop being inhabitants in order
to be passengers of their zones of separation.
The contemporary city and its infinity of possibilities, which
beyond the streets is a living organism woven of shared experiences.
The city is a livelihood of human adventure, because it is the people
who live it and thanks to the seductions of conversation, of the
encounter, of the inter-view beyond the times, they can be known
and narrated. That is, it is possible to know the city in its complex,
contradictory, intermediate and transit realities... human rivers,
crowds, laboratories and privileged spaces of human understanding,
where the reporter, nomadic viewer, lives and builds the knowledge
of passive journalism, inhabitant educator of freedom and opinion,
in other words, citizen educator, since urban dynamics prefigure the
assumption of other ways of being and being in the world.
4. The inter-view-encounter
As a development of the proposal made in my book, I

will advance here the importance of the method of the inter-view-
encounter in this methodology. The conversation or inter-view-
encounter is a fundamental method of the reportage methodology
since it allows us to inter-view beyond the surfaces and to
understand a phenomenon in depth in order to narrate it. Interview
for what? Inter-view, looked, heard and felt as dialogue, encounter,
deep communion conversation, reportage method that produces

knowledge. Polyphonic dialogue that transforms a field interview
into an experiment in equality.
Here is the interview: the path of encounter with the other. In
the work of the reporter, the interview is the way to look for the human
expressions that remain on the threshold of the most intimate part of
the culture. We know that both written and transmedia reporting are
preceded by speech and that the art of narrating is part of life itself,
integrated into social manifestations. The interview that comes out of
the everyday life, of the Human Being, weaves the stories that are part
of the event in the community. In order to revive the past and fix the
present, we have to go through our orality and we must reinstate the
old practice of dialogue among humans, in which the various parts
come out enriched.
The methodology of reportage depends on interviews with
people, research subjects or narrators, who are our collaborators
and partners in our project. However, what emerges from these
testimonies is the version of achievements, which is why interviews
were always on the agenda, in the form or way of capturing life
experiences. Listening with refined ears is the path for greater
reflection and time, a mastery of the art of listening to the other and
living in harmony with him or her. The conversations of reporters
with their interviewees show us the ways of communication,
i.e., communion. Through these paths, the reporter develops the
interview beyond technique, in its dialogical virtues. The Brazilian
researcher Cremilda Medina proposes that:
In the daily life of contemporary man there is room for possible

dialogue. There are experiences or exceptions to the rule that
promote the degree of concretization of the interview in collective
communication. Their greater or lesser communication is directly
related to the humanization of interactive contact: when, in one
of those rare moments, both -interviewee and interviewer- come
out “changed” from the encounter, the technique was surpassed
by the “intimacy” between the I and the You (Medina, 1995, p.7).
Under this view, interview is the essence of quality journalism

and of the method of reportage. Likewise, in the human sciences
the interview evokes, and will still evoke, a gigantic critical and
methodological work. The interview, evidently, merges into the
most doubtful and richest of the sources, the word. She faces the
permanent risk of dissimulation or fabulation.
[

The closed question constrains an intimidating alternative,

imposes a scheme and faces the risk of maximum error, while
on the other hand, that of coding, interpretation and exploitation
offers maximum guarantees. The open question and the
spontaneous response allow (and, above all, for deep analysis) for
fabulation, truth sensitivity and a wealth of meanings: albeit this
time the maximum risk of error is on the side of the interviewer,
of his ability to decipher the interviewee’s message, of his ability
to establish a comparison, in a nutshell, his ability of transforming
a raw human document into scientific data (Morin, 1995, p. 211).
The interviewer must possess a rare degree of objectivity

and subjective participation. Which means that the reporter must live
up to the role of lay confessor of modern life. Here is the reason for
the interview, a term that comes from the French word entrevoir,
which means “to see each other reciprocally”, or even better, to
mix, as it has happened for centuries in Our Half-Blood America.
Transculturation process. This notion of interview as a method, a
path to a meeting, walks hand in hand with experience-action; but
an action beyond the physical presences, encompassing the action-
on-the-own-experience, or on the experience of others. Experience
as a knowledge in movement, experience with the participation of
the subject, i.e., the experience of what has been lived, methods
of reporting and the field of human sciences: anthropology,
philosophy, history, psychology, semiotics, sociology, all concerned
with disclosing communication with the other, i.e., with communion
in process. Therefore, communication becomes only a “space”, a
crossroad where the different areas of the social and human sciences
meet and merge. There we find the emergence of the human subject
in spoken action-experience, a very powerful phenomenon in Latin
America, where the majority live in oral culture: expression of their
worldview, their feeling, therir thinking, their loving.
Interview is not only an instrument or a tool but a method
within a process that addresses the essence of our subjective
experience, to arrive at the versions of life and not at an established
truth of the facts of the world. Interview, sacred effervescence of
communion. But how is interview when seen from the inside? A
complex ritual not only on the outside, but also inside the subject-
subject encounter, in the confession of human beings who live
extraordinary times of turbulence and emotional urgencies, seeking
their way between the sacred and the profane (as the Spanish poet
Antonio Machado says: Traveler, there is no path, the path is made by
walking), where we the complex way of walking-thinking:
... is imposed at the outset as an impossibility to simplify; it

arises where the complex unit produces its emergencies, where
the distinctions and clarities in the identities and causalities are
lost, where disorders and uncertainties disturb the phenomena,
where the subject-observer surprises his own face in the object
of his observation (Morin, 1977, pp. 377-378).
Interview, intelligence in action that transforms the substract

of living beings full of experience, who open their hearts and tell their
complexities, because history is inside of us, that natural thing that
people carry with them, in the first principle of the unity, the self included
in the other self. Encounter as a method of knowledge and a network of
connections between people, events and the world. The lived experience
guides the interview in the dialogue, in the conversation, in the encounter
towards otherness, that communion of intimacy in the conscience of each
one. The sharing of life experience is the moment in which the revelation of
the other can be produced in depth. In the interview method, the participant
observer enters the reality of his research subject through empathy. Since
we can have the freedom to see the other in the way that art is lived:
A novel, a poem, a painting, a musical piece are all individuals,

i.e., beings in which the expression of what is expressed can be
distinguished, whose meaning is only accessible through direct
contact and which radiate its meaning without abandoning its
place in time and space. It is in this sense that our body is
comparable to the work of art (Merleauponty, 1971, p.162).
However, our existence must be put in context. Contexts that

are a meeting of specific temporalities and that constitute networks of
dialogues. We are subjects who live in different communities with special
and porous specialties and temporalities that make up the dimension
of human pluralism. In these transculturation9 networks we live the
experience of observers; but beyond the participant observer we propose
the observer of the transcultural experience, from within himself and from
the other. In other words, a taste-knowledge of the act of interviewing in
reportage as a methodology of literary journalism. Interview, the sacred
space in a ritual moment, where the participating subjects relate (to each
other) within the territory of communion. Here there are no spectators,
only participating actors who through their dialogue make their meeting
more and more intense and involving, seeking a fusion in the relationships
that each one lives on, in order to experience the climate found in the
mutations of the oral history of life, where a written degree of the spoken
and a spoken degree of the written are produced: the metaphorical way
of the complex affective intonation.

5. Reporting what was inter-viewed (in the guise of conclusion)
In this proposal of reportage as a methodology of literary

journalism the inter-view-encounter, the human exchange, the
possible dialogue, are a movement and an act that may become a
“sacrament”, i.e., a communion with the other. It is the history of
human beings who live in orality and express for the other the needs
that are unique to the lived experiences. It is the methodological
workshop of contemporary narrative, paths of the anonymous sages,
experimenters of communicative essays called journalism.
The participants of this affective communion, aware of the
duties they assume, break the technicality in order to generate a
narrative of the subject present in the world, integrated into their
experience-action, formed in the intimacy of consciousness, of each of
the associates of the encounter, where the existences are like the pages
in the book of time. Mediations that live in individuals and in social
and cultural relationships, where experiential reportage is born and
grows, as a modulation of participatory oralities and a laboratory of the
cultural identity of everyday life. The reporter of realities, as a member
of society, merges with his subject-object of study. Guiding us through
the “labyrinths” of transculturations, where intuition is another of the
methods of knowledge in the methodology of reporting. Thus, reporters
are bringing together methods, paths, in order to travel in the process
of knowing the lives of others. Trans-methods to reach our destination,
where each social act has a special meaning that only acquires meaning
in the values shared
by the individuals of society. In these multiple
ways, the investigative reporter will capture the facts that allow him
or her to find the subjective motives that drive the behavior of the
Humane Being. In the way of comprehension, which implies immersion
in intimate experiences, the elements of situations in context they are
revived in the mind of the reporter. By these methods, reportage is a
social methodology based on ever increasing internalization, in the law
written in the heart: we know what is in the outside through what is the
inside, but what is inside is also the apprehension of what is outside,
depending on the degrees and levels of refinement achieved.
To reach the essence of events, we have to awaken those
congenital faculties that allow us to see beyond the appearance of
phenomena. In this profound process, reportage expresses and
understands everyday life. But where does this road start? Through
the core, the hidden and secret place of consciousness, that central,
highly visible and relatively large organ of the individual: the heart.
It is it that reproduces memory through a complex process. For the
Uitotos (Colombian Amazon and Peru) heart, chest, memory and
thought are the same thing. If the West made the heart the seat of
feelings, all traditional civilizations, on the contrary, locate intelligence
and intuition in it: perhaps the center of the personality has been
dislocated from the intectuality towards affectivity. But did not Pascal
say that the great thoughts come from the heart? It can be added that,
in traditional cultures, knowledge has a very broad meaning, which
does not exclude affective values. Pascal saw the universe as an infinite
sphere, whose center is everywhere, and our center is the heart, which
together with the senses weaves the rhythm of existence. Recognizing
their powers means recreating reality, which is always present, means
founding the affectivity that is much desired by the curiosity to see,
know, unveil, learn, awake, discover, identify; but especially it means
observing, which is contemplation (theoria) and participation of all our
senses for the Comprehension of the Humane Being.
NOTES
1 Aguilera (1992), Borrat (1989) Chillón (1999) y (2014),

Gargurevich (1982), Grijelmo (2001), Gutiérrez (1984), Hernando
(2000), Martín (1973), Martínez (1983), Martínez (1996), Matute
(1997), Melo (2006), Mignolo (1982), Monsiváis (2005) e (2010),
Rotker (1992) Vilamor (2000), White (1992), Yanes Mesa (2006).
2 The Future of News? Virtual Reality | Nonny de la Peña | TED Talks:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsLz0mRmEG0&t=211s
3 A term that designates the fieldwork of journalists. Through

journalistic principles of reporting, we know that the search for
information starts with a topic assignment, the first step in news
writing, which must also be simultaneously considered as an
investigation project, a problem to solve.
4 Later in this paper I will discuss with more depth interview as a method.
5 “The world is a delicious delicacy for the senses. (...) There is no

way of understanding the world without first detecting it with
the antennae of the senses. (...) Our senses define the frontiers of

consciousness and, as we are explorers and born investigators of

the unknown, we spend a large part of our lives traveling through
this turbulent paramenter...” (Ackerman, 1993, p. 13).
6 Among the ancient Greeks, fratria was the subdivison of a tribe

that had its own rituals and sacrifices.
7 One of the divisions of the ancient Roman people. It was

constituted by the court, the familiy and the king’s retinue.
8 Peter Sloterdijk is a German philosopher and scholar from

the Karlsruhe School of Arts and Design. His Spheres trilogy
begins with an invocation to the senses, sensations and the
understanding of the surrounding environment.
9 “Every cultural exchange or, as we shall say from now on, every
transculturation, is a process in which something is always given
in exchange for something that is received; a “toma y daca”, as the
Spanish say. It is a process in which both parts of the equation are
modified in the end. A process in which a new, composed and complex
reality emerges; a reality that is not a mechanical agglutination
of characters, neither a mosaic, but rather a new, original and
independent phenomenon. In order to describe such a process, the
Latin-rooted word trans-culturation provides a terminology that
does not implies that a certain culture tends towarda another, but
rather a transition between two cultures in which both are active
and contributive as inputs, and both cooperative to the advent of a
new civilization reality” (Malinowski, 1978, p. 4-5).
* Translated by Mateus Yuri Passos
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RAÚL HERNANDO OSORIO VARGAS has a master

degree (1999) and PhD (2003) in Communication
Sciences, from the School of Communications
and Arts of the University of São Paulo. He is a full
professor at the University of Antioquia, in the School
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Studies Group, GEL. Email: [email protected]
RECEIVED ON: 31/05/2018 | APPROVED ON: 01/09/2018

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Raúl Hernando Osorio Vargas

RAÚL HERNANDO OSORIO VARGAS

ABSTRACT – I sustain in my book El reportaje como metodologia del periodismo: una

REPORTAGEM: metodologia do jornalismo literário

720 Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

REPORTAJE: metodología del periodismo literario

RESUMEN – En mi libro El reportaje como metodología del periodismo. Una polifonía de

This paper works with the hipothesis according to which

and transcendent analysis of the contemporary sociopolitical realities

722 Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

Literature is a lifeform because life, just like Literature, is

The history of literary journalism is full of contacts and

based on the flagrant statements that surface in a dialogical system

724 Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

as the place of collective memory that allows for the reporter to

As widely known, methodology is the science of methods, or

À portée de la voix (within reach of the voice) an ancient

The year 1440 marks the beginning of what Marshall McLuhan

Thus, we must go deep into the roots of reportage in order

726 Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

Port: from the Latin portāre. Having something with oneself,

3. The infinite search…

The spiral of visions we get from a journey through

728 Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

cosmovision. Culture stimulates new studies, new readings, new

By describing places and scenes in time methodology-

730 Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

group of families formed an association, which the Greek language

As a development of the proposal made in my book, I

deep communion conversation, reportage method that produces

In the daily life of contemporary man there is room for possible

Under this view, interview is the essence of quality journalism

732 Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

The closed question constrains an intimidating alternative,

The interviewer must possess a rare degree of objectivity

... is imposed at the outset as an impossibility to simplify; it

Interview, intelligence in action that transforms the substract

A novel, a poem, a painting, a musical piece are all individuals,

However, our existence must be put in context. Contexts that

734 Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

5. Reporting what was inter-viewed (in the guise of conclusion)

In this proposal of reportage as a methodology of literary

1 Aguilera (1992), Borrat (1989) Chillón (1999) y (2014),

2 The Future of News? Virtual Reality | Nonny de la Peña | TED Talks:

3 A term that designates the fieldwork of journalists. Through

5 “The world is a delicious delicacy for the senses. (...) There is no

736 Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

consciousness and, as we are explorers and born investigators of

6 Among the ancient Greeks, fratria was the subdivison of a tribe

7 One of the divisions of the ancient Roman people. It was

8 Peter Sloterdijk is a German philosopher and scholar from

* Translated by Mateus Yuri Passos

Ackerman, D. (1993). Una historia natural de los sentidos. Barcelona:

Aguilera, O. (1992). La literatura en el periodismo y otros estudios en

Balle, F. (1991). Comunicación y Sociedad: Evolución y análisis

Borrat, H. (1989). El periódico, actor político. Barcelona: Gustavo Gili.

Chillón, A. (1999). Literatura y periodismo. Una tradición de relaciones

Chillón, A. (2014). La palabra facticia. Literatura, periodismo y

Gargurevich, J. (1982). Géneros Periodísticos. Quito: Ciespal