A collective book that thinks about “media writing”

A new collective book that brings together Moroccan academics, researchers and professionals in the field of journalism to think about “media writing” was recently published by Dar Siliki Akhwain in Tangier, entitled “Writing in the Media Context between the Literature of Imagination and Digital Hypothesis,” after it was prepared and coordinated by researchers Karim Baba and Hisham Bin Al-Hashemi.

This new collective work includes the research of Ismail Azzam, Mohamed Karim Boukhassas, Abdel Samad Jattioui, Anouar Lakhel, Karim Baba, Mohamed Zouhri, Hussein El Mashat, El Hadj Allal Omrani, Aicha Bouzarar, Nizar Khairoun, and Mohamed Fajri. It considers journalistic narration as the umbilical cord remaining with the reader, as documentation of history and an exploration of details, and looks at the intersections of writing between journalism and literature, asking: “Can narrative writing save the future of traditional journalism?”

The book also explores creative experiences in journalistic writing, the tensions of media writing between the identity of the text and the horizon of enjoyment, the constant and variable nature of media writing in the digital age, and the news story as a model of innovation in narrative storytelling. It also questions the rule of journalistic writing known as the “inverted pyramid” and its necessity or lack thereof in digital journalistic writing.

The introductory paper for the new edition states that it “includes between its covers the papers and scientific interventions of the participants in the international symposium organized by the University Master’s Specialized in New Media and Digital Marketing at Ibn Tofail University for the 2023 academic year, in partnership with the Dafaf Forum for Media Studies and Performance Arts, and the Al Jazeera Media Institute, and with scientific coordination from researchers Dr. Hisham Bin Al-Hashemi, the founding pedagogical coordinator of the course, Dr. Karim Baba, a member of the pedagogical team, and a scientific committee from various Moroccan university institutions.”

The source continues: “The scientific contributions, which were supervised by a scientific committee composed of researchers from different universities, were divided into two main parts; the first relates to scientific papers by researchers and experts (…) This issue also included a list of presentations and readings completed by research students in the university master’s degree specializing in new media and digital marketing at Ibn Tofail University.”

Among the purposes of integrating the work of student researchers to think from new publications interested in the subject of narrative, according to the same paper, is “to connect the student researcher in the field of media with the various tributaries of creativity, foremost among which are literary and artistic imagination.”