First Take: In general, “genre” is a term used to identify a recognizable or established category of writing–as it were, a “type” or subcategory that distinguishes one species of writing from another. As such, genre is typically connected to conventions, since each is thought to reciprocally identify the other: a sonnet is, for instance, conventionally a fourteen-line poem, or a naturalist novel characteristically presents characters swept up in the determining power of their social circumstances.

Deeper: Along with representing the conventions imported into journalism from more recognized literary genres (e.g. travel writing, or the war novel), many varieties of narrative journalism have occupied critical interest as individual genres:  for example, the profile, and ethnographic realism; the so-called “Gonzo Journalism” made famous by Hunter Thompson; the immersion or undercover narrative; and others.

         But in fact, as even these examples suggest, genre is a rather slippery concept. It is actually used at many different levels of generalization: some will say genres are the fundamental, baseline forms of writing (poetry, drama, and so on); others will use the term for more specialized subcategories of those forms, such as “lyric poetry” or “the mystery novel” or “the noir mystery.”  Even here, the criteria used to subdivide a genre will vary widely–texts are categorized in genres, say, by their formal characteristics (again, a sonnet), or by what their subject matter or content is (as, for example, “science fiction,” which could take any form). And most critics will say there is no pure example of any one genre, since the classic examples are often found to transcend or break the rules supposedly used to define a category in the first place. Of late–as I do myself, starting in Chapter 4–critics have turned to the idea of “modes” rather than genres, in part to refer to smaller-scale, more temporary operations within given texts (e.g. a “melodramatic” mode, rather than saying a text is  “a melodrama”) that actually can appear in many different genre categories.          
            Not surprisingly, these difficulties of using genre categories, or modes, carries over into scholarly discussions of reportage: does “immersion,” for example, refer to a style of narrative or the reporting strategy behind it (see entry on immersion)? If Tom Wolfe gave “The New Journalism” a manifesto in 1973, was he describing a movement, a set of reporting principles, or the literary agenda of a given genre? If we want to speak of “long-form” journalism, are we saying length is a particular requirement of the “genre”? These kinds of tensions, of course, will accompany almost any critical category; it comes, we might say, with the genre of criticism.