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Crafting cultural resonance

Imaginative power in everyday journalism

James S. Ettema

Northwestern University, j-ettema{at}northwestern.edu

To offer mythic appeal or ritual value, news must be framed not only to make certain facts and interpretations salient but also to resonate with what writers and readers take to be real and important matters of life. Paralleling salience as an effect of selectivity in fact-gathering and emphasis in news-writing, this study argues that resonance is an effect of those same practices when accomplished with eloquence. Continuing coverage of a particular news event provides the opportunity to study the recurring narrative structures and rhetorical strategies that just seemed to work in telling the story. That story, a poignant death and its aftermath, illustrates three resources for crafting resonance - all of which point to an ultimate source of resonance in the complexities of human desire.

Key Words: frame • gaze • irony • myth • narrative • news • reflexivity • resonance • ritual • social action

Journalism, Vol. 6, No. 2, 131-152 (2005)
DOI: 10.1177/1464884905051005
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