The characteristics that lead us to regard Crane's two accounts of surviving a disaster at sea as journalism on the one hand and a short story on the other are not inherent in the texts. Although we may believe that journalism and fiction are qualitatively different, we are taking our cues from the contexts in which we find them and from particular narrative conventions that we reify as properties of fictional texts, such as third-person point of view and the existence of two levels of narration in the short story. On the basis of extrinsic factors, we identify the texts either as obviously literary (capable of conveying universal truths) or as journalistic (belonging to the medium that reports everyday facts).

These generalized distinctions, in turn, produce a particular version of literary history, such as the widely held view that the founders of realism, from Twain to Hemingway, were journalists first. In this view, writers practice their powers of observation and impersonal narration at the city desk and then apply them to invented characters and to subjects with a broader appeal.