Immersion Journalism or Immersionism is a style of journalism

Journalism

Journalism is the practice of investigation and reporting of events, issues and trends to a broad audience in a timely fashion. Though there are many variations of journalism, the ideal is to inform the intended audience. Along with covering organizations and institutions such as government and...

 similar to gonzo journalism

Gonzo journalism

Gonzo journalism is a style of journalism that is written without claims of objectivity, often including the reporter as part of the story via a first-person narrative. The word "gonzo" is believed to be first used in 1970 to describe an article by Hunter S. Thompson, who later popularized the style...

. Like Gonzo, immersionism details an individual's experiences from a deeply personal perspective. An individual will choose a situation, and immerse themselves in the events and people involved. Unlike Gonzo, however, it is less focused on the writer's life, and more about the writer's specific experiences. Proponents of immersion journalism claim that this research strategy allows authors to describe the internal experience of external events and break away from the limiting pseudo-objectivity of traditional journalism. Critics of immersionism (who sometimes call it "stunt journalism") argue that by using such methods, writers are just "playing tourist" in the lives (and often tragedies) of other people.

Book-length examples of immersion journalism include H.G. Bissinger's Friday Night Lights

Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream

Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream is a 1990 non-fiction book written by H. G. Bissinger. The book follows the story of the 1988 Permian High School Panthers football team from Odessa, Texas as they made a run towards the Texas state championship...

; John Howard Griffin

John Howard Griffin

John Howard Griffin was an American journalist and author much of whose writing was about racial equality. He is best known for darkening his skin and journeying through Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia to experience segregation in the Deep South in 1959...

's Black Like Me

Black Like Me

Black Like Me is a non-fiction book by journalist John Howard Griffin first published in 1961. Griffin was a white native of Mansfield, Texas and the book describes his six-week experience travelling on Greyhound buses throughout the racially segregated states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama...

; Ted Conover

Ted Conover

Ted Conover is an American author and journalist. A graduate of Denver's Manual High School and Amherst College and a Marshall Scholar, he is also a distinguished writer-in-residence in the of New York University...

's Rolling Nowhere, Coyotes and Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing

Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing

Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing is a non-fiction book by Ted Conover, published in 2000. In the book, Conover, a journalist and university professor, recounts his experience of learning about the New York State correctional system by becoming a correctional officer for nearly a year...

; Barbara Ehrenreich

Barbara Ehrenreich

-Early life:Ehrenreich was born Barbara Alexander to Isabelle Oxley and Ben Howes Alexander in Butte, Montana, which she describes as then being "a bustling, brawling, blue collar mining town."...

's Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (2001), Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream; (2005) and Matthew Thompson's My Colombian Death (2008).

Vice

Vice (magazine)

VICE is a free magazine and media conglomerate founded in Montreal, Quebec and currently based in New York City.Vice is available in 27 countries...

magazine has also produced an entire issue looking at immersionism.