“Speculative” Memoir Fragments and Existential Dilemmas

Abstract

In Chapter 3, we turn the tables from audiences back to journalists to examine how journalists are narrating their own professional identity through real-time “speculative” memoir fragments. This chapter explores how American and Canadian journalists are struggling with their own personal reckoning and existential crises with respect to issues of truth, subjectivity, and power and how to narrate oneself in a global journalism landscape with multiple colonial histories. Drawing on a range of memoir fragments from a series of behind-the-scenes, first-person animated graphic videos titled Correspondent Confidential that ran on Vice Media and exemplars of “quit lit” (where journalists publicly explain their rationale for leaving journalism or doing it differently), we argue that there is an emergent ethical meta genre concerning how journalists are dealing with the “view from nowhere” in a global journalism context that calls for increased location of identity and interests.