Immersion Journalism or Immersionism is a style of journalism similar to gonzo journalism. 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; John Howard Griffin's Black Like Me; Ted Conover's Rolling Nowhere, Coyotes and Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing; Barbara Ehrenreich'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).