The recognition of journalistic essays as a way to increase the longevity of Brazilian news pieces

Abstract

Essays are a form of writing which has been recognized for centuries. The genre, often attributed to Montaigne, is not only present in academia, and occupies the pages of newspapers, magazines, and websites, being surprisingly true to its more traditional forms when used as the script for video essays. The work of journalists such as Joan Didion and Gay Talese has often been gathered from the pages of magazines and published in volumes of essays. If news articles, owing to the historical and social perception of the genre, are seen as ephemeral, the essay is long-lived, escaping this fate. As a result, recognizing journalistic texts as essays helps giving them well-deserved prestige in them, helping them stay as recognized works, even if their nature does have something in common with the more ephemeral articles. In Brazil, certain texts are never recognized for their essayistic character, being forgotten in the pages of magazines or websites, never to receive the appreciation they deserve, since they are not seen as essays, but as journalistic articles or opinions which often do not survive for long and are rarely collected in volumes. The goal of this work is showing that many Brazilian journalistic texts are, indeed, essays. Considering texts recognized as journalistic essays in English-speaking countries, as well as many of the most important works about the essay, this paper shows that many texts published in Brazil as articles or opinion pieces would live longer if we recognized that they belong to the more prestigious genre of the essay.