Ethnography can legitimately encompass newspaper and secondary-source analysis, not only fieldwork

Evidence

Although the classic methods of ethnography are participant observation, listening, and interviewing, any approach that assists the journey toward a detailed empirical knowledge of a particular “social world” can be ethnographic: wading through mounds of newspapers (primary materials for the “social world” of social reaction); reading masses of secondary material in the form of books, articles, and commentaries (on the “social worlds” of police and black youth, for example); and living and working in the “social world” of Handsworth (in the case of one of us). — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 1044

Categorization

• DEFINE: Broadens ‘ethnography’ from classic fieldwork to any method achieving detailed empirical knowledge of a social world, including archival and media analysis.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how does this expanded, pragmatic ethnography differ from mere mixed-methods journalism for Hall?