New Journalism
New Journalism is a style of news writing and journalism which was developed in the 1960s and 1970s, that uses literary techniques previously seen as unconventional in news writing contexts. It is characterized by the presence of a subjective perspective and style that is reminiscent of long-form non-fiction. Through extensive imagery and observations, reporters interpolate subjective language within facts while immersing themselves in the stories as they report and write them. This differs from traditional journalism, where the journalist is "invisible"; facts are meant to be reported objectively.
The term was made popular by Tom Wolfe's 1973 collection of journalism articles he published named The New Journalism, which included works by Hunter S. Thompson, Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, Terry Southern and others. The pieces from these writers were all long-form, narrative focused reports that used literary tools not seen in typical news writing.
Most New Journalism articles were not found in newspapers, but in magazines such as The Atlantic, Harper's, CoEvolution Quarterly, Esquire, New York, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, and for a short while in the early 1970s, Scanlan's Monthly.
New Journalism is viewed mainly as a U.S. journalistic style and movement, but the idea of literary journalism has been around since the twentieth century in Europe and Latin America.
Global uses of New Journalism
New Journalism is seen as a subset of literary journalism, a style that uses writing techniques typically seen in literature and has an emphasis on narrative in the reporting. New Journalism, while associated with American journalists, utilizes tools that are used and have been used internationally for decades.In France and the UK, long-form narrative reporting has been seen in newspapers and magazines. For France, in much of the political coverage done, journalists would bring in analysis, on-site observations, as well as personal perspective. UK feature writers utilized New Journalism techniques a lot in their post-war coverage, most commonly by using literary descriptions of what they were covering.
Additionally, in many Latin American countries, narrative journalism was used in a way that is emulated by American New Journalism techniques. Journalist Rodolfo Walsh wrote an investigative piece called Operación Masacre in 1957 which read as a literary non-fiction account of a political massacre in Argentina.
Colombian Journalist Gabriel García Márquez wrote The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor in 1955, which told the story of Luis Alejandro Velasco being adrift at sea for 10 days.
Narrative journalism that came out of Latin America came as a result political instability, censorship, and social movements. The goal was often to combat or expose corruption and state violence.
Precursors and alternate uses of the term
Throughout the history of American journalism there have been a variety of people who've used the label "new journalism". Robert E. Park, in his Natural History of the Newspaper, referred to the advent of the penny press in the 1830s as "new journalism". Likewise, the appearance of the yellow press—papers such as Joseph Pulitzer's New York World in the 1880s—led journalists and historians to proclaim that a "New Journalism" had been created. Ault and Emery, for instance, said "ndustrialization and urbanization changed the face of America during the latter half of the Nineteenth century, and its newspapers entered an era known as that of the 'New Journalism.' John Hohenberg, in The Professional Journalist, called the interpretive reporting which developed after World War II a "new journalism which not only seeks to explain as well as to inform; it even dares to teach, to measure, to evaluate."During the 1960s and 1970s, the term enjoyed widespread popularity, often with meanings bearing little or no connection with one another. Although James E. Murphy noted that "...most uses of the term seem to refer to something no more specific than vague new directions in journalism", Curtis D. MacDougal devoted the preface of the sixth edition of his Interpretative Reporting to New Journalism and cataloged many of the contemporary definitions: "Activist, advocacy, participatory, tell-it-as-you-see-it, sensitivity, investigative, saturation, humanistic, reformist and a few more."
The Magic Writing Machine—Student Probes of the New Journalism, a collection edited and introduced by Everette E. Dennis, came up with six categories, labelled new nonfiction, alternative journalism, advocacy journalism, underground journalism and precision journalism. Michael Johnson's The New Journalism addresses itself to three phenomena: the underground press, the artists of nonfiction, and changes in the established media.
First usage
is credited with coining the term "New Journalism" in 1887, which went on to define an entire genre of newspaper history, particularly Lord Northcliffe's turn-of-the-century press empire. However, at the time the target of Arnold's irritation was not Northcliffe, but the sensational journalism of Pall Mall Gazette editor W. T. Stead. He strongly disapproved of Stead's muck-raking and declared that, under this control, "the P.M.G., whatever may be its merits, is fast ceasing to be literature." Stead himself called his brand of journalism 'Government by Journalism'.Early development, 1960s
, a practitioner and principal advocate of the form, wrote in at least two articles in 1972 that he had no idea of where it began. Trying to shed light on the matter, literary critic Seymour Krim offered his explanation in 1973. "I'm certain that Pete Hamill| Hamill first used the expression. In about April of 1965 he called me at Nugget Magazine, where I was editorial director, and told me he wanted to write an article about new New Journalism. It was to be about the exciting things being done in the old reporting genre by Talese, Wolfe and Jimmy Breslin. He never wrote the piece, so far as I know, but I began using the expression in conversation and writing. It was picked up and stuck."Despite the uncertainty of the term itself, there is evidence of literary experimentation in the early 1960s. Norman Mailer wrote his early political essay "Superman Comes to the Supermarket" about the 1960 nomination of John F. Kennedy. The piece established a precedent which Mailer would later build on in his 1968 convention coverage and in other nonfiction as well.
Wolfe wrote that his first acquaintance with a new style of reporting came in a 1962 Esquire article about Joe Louis by Gay Talese. "Joe Louis at Fifty" wasn't like a magazine article at all; it was like a short story that began an intimate confrontation between Louis and his third wife. Wolfe said Talese was the first to apply fiction techniques to reporting. Esquire claimed credit as the seedbed for these new techniques. Esquire editor Harold Hayes later wrote that "in the Sixties, events seemed to move too swiftly to allow the osmotic process of art to keep abreast, and when we found a good novelist we immediately sought to seduce him with the sweet mysteries of current events." Soon others, notably New York, followed Esquires lead, and the style eventually reached other magazines and then books.
A few somewhat less playfully examples of the new form are: Hannah Arendt's "Eichmann in Jerusalem", John Hersey's "Hiroshima", and Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring"; articles which respectively introduced the Holocaust, nuclear war, and the existential threat of mass extinction into public consciousness for the first time for most of their contemporary readers.
1970s
Much of the criticism favorable to this New Journalism came from the writers themselves. Talese and Wolfe asserted that although what they wrote may look like fiction, it was indeed reporting. "Fact reporting, leg work", Talese called it.Wolfe, in Esquire for December, 1972, hailed the replacement of the novel by the New Journalism as literature's "main event" and detailed the points of similarity and contrast between the New Journalism and the novel. The four techniques of realism that he and the other New Journalists employed, he wrote, had been the sole province of novelists and other literati. They are scene-by-scene construction, full record of dialogue, third-person point of view and the manifold incidental details to round out character. The result:
... is a form that is not merely like a novel. It consumes devices that happen to have originated with the novel and mixes them with every other device known to prose. And all the while, quite beyond matters of technique, it enjoys an advantage so obvious, so built-in, one almost forgets what power it has: the simple fact that the reader knows all this actually happened. The disclaimers have been erased. The screen is gone. The writer is one step closer to the absolute involvement of the reader that Henry James and James Joyce dreamed of but never achieved.
The key difference between the new nonfiction and conventional reporting is that the basic unit of reporting was no longer the data or piece of information, but the scene. Scene is what underlies "the sophisticated strategies of prose".
The first of the new breed of nonfiction writers to receive wide notoriety was Truman Capote, whose 1965 best-seller, In Cold Blood, was a detailed narrative of the murder of a Kansas farm family. Capote culled material from some 6,000 pages of notes. The book brought its author instant celebrity. Capote announced that he had created a new art form which he labelled the "nonfiction novel".
I've always had the theory that reportage is the great unexplored art form... I've had this theory that a factual piece of work could explore whole new dimensions in writing that would have a double effect fiction does not have—the very fact of its being true, every word of it's true, would add a double contribution of strength and impact
Capote continued to stress that he was a literary artist, not a journalist, but critics hailed the book as a classic example of New Journalism.
Wolfe's The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, whose introduction and title story, according to James E. Murphy, "emerged as a manifesto of sorts for the nonfiction genre," was published the same year. In his introduction, Wolfe wrote that he encountered trouble fashioning an Esquire article out of material on a custom car extravaganza in Los Angeles, in 1963. Finding he could not do justice to the subject in magazine article format, he wrote a letter to his editor, Byron Dobell, which grew into a 49-page report detailing the custom car world, complete with scene construction, dialogue and flamboyant description. Esquire ran the letter, striking out "Dear Byron." and it became Wolfe's maiden effort as a New Journalist.
In an article entitled "The Personal Voice and the Impersonal Eye", Dan Wakefield acclaimed the nonfiction of Capote and Wolfe as elevating reporting to the level of literature, terming that work and some of Norman Mailer's nonfiction a journalistic breakthrough: reporting "charged with the energy of art". A review by Jack Newfield of Dick Schaap's Turned On saw the book as a good example of budding tradition in American journalism which rejected many of the constraints of conventional reporting:
This new genre defines itself by claiming many of the techniques that were once the unchallenged terrain of the novelist: tension, symbol, cadence, irony, prosody, imagination.
A 1968 review of Wolfe's The Pump House Gang and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test said Wolfe and Mailer were applying "the imaginative resources of fiction" to the world around them and termed such creative journalism "hystory" to connote their involvement in what they reported. Talese in 1970, in his Author's Note to Fame and Obscurity, a collection of his pieces from the 1960s, wrote:
The new journalism, though often reading like fiction, is not fiction. It is, or should be, as reliable as the most reliable reportage although it seeks a larger truth than is possible through the mere compilation of verifiable facts, the use of direct quotations, and adherence to the rigid organizational style of the older form.
Seymour Krim's Shake It for the World, Smartass, which appeared in 1970, contained "An Open Letter to Norman Mailer" which defined New Journalism as "a free nonfictional prose that uses every resource of the best fiction." In "The Newspaper As Literature/Literature As Leadership", he called journalism "the de facto literature" of the majority, a synthesis of journalism and literature that the book's postscript called "journalit". In 1972, in "An Enemy of the Novel", Krim identified his own fictional roots and declared that the needs of the time compelled him to move beyond fiction to a more "direct" communication to which he promised to bring all of fiction's resources.
David McHam, in an article titled "The Authentic New Journalists", distinguished the nonfiction reportage of Capote, Wolfe and others from other, more generic interpretations of New Journalism. Also in 1971, William L. Rivers disparaged the former and embraced the latter, concluding, "In some hands, they add a flavor and a humanity to journalistic writing that push it into the realm of art." Charles Brown in 1972 reviewed much that had been written as New Journalism and about New Journalism by Capote, Wolfe, Mailer and others and labelled the genre "New Art Journalism", which allowed him to test it both as art and as journalism. He concluded that the new literary form was useful only in the hands of literary artists of great talent.
In the first of two pieces by Wolfe in New York detailing the growth of the new nonfiction and its techniques, Wolfe returned to the fortuitous circumstances surrounding the construction of Kandy-Kolored and added:
Its virtue was precisely in showing me the possibility of there being something "new" in journalism. What interested me was not simply the discovery that it was possible to write accurate nonfiction with techniques usually associated with novels and short stories. It was that—plus. It was the discovery that it was possible in nonfiction, in journalism, to use any literary device, from the traditional dialogisms of the essay to stream-of-consciousness...