New Journalism
Encyclopedia
New Journalism was a style of 1960s and 1970s news writing and journalism
which used literary techniques deemed unconventional at the time. The term was codified with its current meaning by Tom Wolfe
in a 1973 collection of journalism articles he published as The New Journalism
, which included works by himself, Truman Capote
, Hunter S. Thompson
, Norman Mailer
, Joan Didion
, Robert Christgau
, and others.
Articles in the New Journalism style tended not to be found in newspapers, but rather in magazines such as The Atlantic Monthly
, Harper's, CoEvolution Quarterly
, Esquire
, New York
, The New Yorker
, Rolling Stone
, and for a short while in the early 1970s, Scanlan's Monthly
.
, for instance, 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 "Industrialization 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.'" In 1960, 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 sixties and seventies, the term enjoyed widespread popularity, often with meanings bearing manifestly little or no connection with one another. Although James E. Murphy noted that "...most uses of the term seem to refer to something 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 (reportage), alternative journalism ("modern muckraking"), 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.
Journalists recognized as using the style include Norman Mailer
, Joan Didion
, Truman Capote
, P. J. O'Rourke
, George Plimpton
, Terry Southern
, and Gay Talese
. Hunter S. Thompson
was a major practitioner of new journalism and gonzo journalism
, his own particular style. Thompson's first book, Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs, is a more conventional piece, and shows the beginnings of a more memoir-based approach to reportage. Gay Talese's 1966 article for Esquire, Frank Sinatra Has a Cold
, was an influential piece of new journalism that gave a detailed portrait of Frank Sinatra
without ever interviewing him.
New journalism writers brought new approaches to areas already covered by the mainstream press.
The psychedelic movement was something that many of the writers of the period covered, such as in Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
. The Vietnam War
was another common topic, as was the political turmoil on the homefront. Terry Southern
's Grooving in Chi documented the 1968 Chicago National Democratic Convention for Esquire
in new journalism manner. New journalism's techniques were also applied to less obvious subjects, such as financial markets (by George Goodman
under the pseudonym Adam Smith, in essays originally published in New York
magazine and later collected in a book called The Money Game.)
Some authors of conventional fiction switched to writing in the style of new journalism, such as Truman Capote
's In Cold Blood
, and Norman Mailer
's Armies of the Night
. However, neither author ever agreed to their style's comparison to Wolfe's school of narration, nor did many others who have been retrospectively promoted as being members and therein associated. Much to the contrary, many of these writers would deny that their work was generically relevant to other new journalists at the time.
, 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.
But wherever and whenever the term arose, there is evidence of some literary experimentation in the early 1960s, as when Norman Mailer
broke away from fiction to write Superman Comes to the Supermarket. A report of John F. Kennedy
's nomination
that year, the piece established a precedent which Mailer would later build on in his 1968 convention
coverage (Miami and the Siege of Chicago
) 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. It began with a scene, 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 Esquire' s lead, and the style eventually infected other magazines and then books.
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 (i.e., descriptive incidentals). The result:
The essential difference between the new nonfiction and conventional reporting is, he said, that the basic unit of reporting was no longer the datum 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."
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 manifest 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:
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:
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:
In the eighties, the use of New Journalism saw a decline, several of the old trailblazers still used fiction techniques in their nonfiction books. However, younger writers in Esquire and Rolling Stone, where the style had flourished in the two earlier decades, shifted away from the New Journalism. Fiction techniques had not been abandoned by these writers, but they were used sparingly and less flamboyantly.
"Whatever happened to the New Journalism?" wondered Thomas Powers
in a 1975 issue of Commonweal
. In 1981, Joe Nocera published a postmortem in the Washington Monthly
blaming its demise on the journalistic liberties taken by Hunter S. Thompson. Regardless of the culprit, less than a decade after Tom Wolfe's 1973 New Journalism anthology, the consensus was that New Journalism was dead.
Much of the critical literature concerns itself with a strain of subjectivism which may be called activism in news reporting. In 1970, Gerald Grant wrote disparagingly in Columbia Journalism Review
of a "New Journalism of passion and advocacy" and in the Saturday Review Hohenberg discussed "The Journalist As Missionary" For Masterson in 1971, "The New Journalism" provided a forum for discussion of journalistic and social activism. In another 1971 article under the same title, Ridgeway called the counter-culture magazines such as The New Republic
and Ramparts
and the American underground press New Journalism.
Another version of subjectivism in reporting is what is sometimes called participatory reporting. Robert Stein, in Media Power, defines New Journalism as "A form of participatory reporting that evolved in parallel with participatory politics
..."
The new nonfiction where sometimes taken for advocacy of subjective journalism. A 1972 article by Dennis Chase defines New Journalism as a subjective journalism emphasizing "truth" over "facts" but uses major nonfiction stylists as its example.
However, others have argued that total immersion enhances accuracy. As Wolfe put the case:
Wolfe coined "saturation reporting" in his Bulletin of the American Society of Newspaper Editors
article. After citing the opening paragraphs of Talese's Joe Louis
piece, he confessed believing that Talese had "piped" or faked the story, only later to be convinced, after learning that Talese so deeply delved into the subject, that he could report entire scenes and dialogues.
In his "Birth of the New Journalism" in New York
, Wolfe returned to the subject, which he here described as a depth of information never before demanded in newspaper work. The New Journalist, he said, must stay with his subject for days and weeks at a stretch. In Wolfe's Esquire piece, saturation became the "Locker Room Genre" of intensive digging into the lives and personalities of one's subject, in contrast to the aloof and genteel tradition of the essayists and "The Literary Gentlemen in the Grandstand."
For Talese, intensive reportage took the form of interior monologue to discover from his subjects what they were thinking, not, he said in a panel discussion reported in Writer's Digest
, merely reporting what people did and said.
Wolfe identified the four main devices New Journalists borrowed from literary fiction
:
Despite these elements, New Journalism is not fiction. It maintains elements of reporting including strict adherence to factual accuracy and the writer being the primary source. To get "inside the head" of a character, the journalist asks the subject what they were thinking or how they felt.
, Truman Capote
, Joan Didion
, David Halberstam, Pete Hamill
, Larry King, Norman Mailer
, Joe McGinniss
, Rex Reed
, Mike Royko, John Sack
, Dick Schaap
, Terry Southern
, Gail Sheehy, Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson
, Dan Wakefield, and Tom Wolfe. In The New Journalism
, Johnson and Wolfe, also includes George Plimpton for his Paper Lion
, Life writer James Mills, Robert Christgau
and a few others. Christgau, however, stated in an 2001 interview that he did not see himself as a New Journalist.
Robert Stein believed that "In the New Journalism the eye of the beholder is all—or almost all," and in 1971 Philip M. Howard, wrote that the new nonfiction writers rejected objectivity in favor of a more personal, subjective reportage. This parallels much of what Wakefield said in his 1966 Atlantic article.
And in spite of the fact that Capote believed in the objective accuracy of In Cold Blood and strove to keep himself totally out of the narrative, one reviewer found in the book the "tendency among writers to resort to subjective sociology, on the other hand, or to super-creative reportage, on the other." Charles Self termed this characteristic of New Journalism as "admitted" subjectivity, whether first-person or third-person, and acknowledged the subjectivity inherent in his account.
Lester Markel polemically criticized New Journalism in the Bulletin of the American Society of Newspaper Editors
, he rejected the claim to greater in-depth reporting and labelled the writers "factual fictionists" and "deep-see reporters." He feared they were performing as sociologists and psychoanalysts rather than as journalists.
More reasoned, though still essentially negative, Arlen in his 1972 "Notes on the New Journalism," put the New Journalism into a larger socio-historical perspective by tracing the techniques from earlier writers and from the constraints and opportunities of the current age. But much of the more routine New Journalism "consists in exercises by writer . . . in gripping and controlling and confronting a subject within the journalist's own temperament. Presumably," he wrote, "this is the 'novelistic technique.'" However, he conceded that the best of this work had "considerably expanded the possibilities of journalism."
Much negative criticism of New Journalism were directed at individual writers. For example, Cynthia Ozick asserted in The New Republic
, that Capote in In Cold Blood was doing little more than trying to devise a form: "One more esthetic manipulation." Sheed offered, in "A Fun-House Mirror," a witty refutation of Wolfe's claim that he takes on the expression and the guise of whomever he is writing about. "The Truman Capotes may hold up a tolerably clear glass to nature," he wrote, "but Wolfe holds up a fun-house mirror, and I for one don't give a hoot whether he calls the reflection fact or fiction."
, whose most vocal criticism compromised a chapter in what became known as "the New Yorker affair" of 1965. Wolfe had written a two-part semi-fictional parody in New York of The New Yorker
and its editor, William Shawn
. Reaction notably from New Yorker writers, was loud and prolonged, but the most significant reaction came from MacDonald, who counterattacked in two articles in the New York Review of Books. In the first, MacDonald termed Wolfe's approach "parajournalism" and applied it to all similar styles. "Parajournalism," MacDonald wrote,
The New Yorker parody, he added, "... revealed the ugly side of Parajournalism when it tries to be serious."
In his second article, MacDonald addressed himself to the accuracy of Wolfe's report. He charged that Wolfe "takes a middle course, shifting gears between fact and fantasy, spoof and reportage, until nobody knows which end is, at the moment, up". New Yorker writers Renata Adler
and Gerald Jonas joined the fray in the Winter 1966 issue of Columbia Journalism Review.
Wolfe himself returned to the affair a full seven years later, devoting the second of his two February New York articles (1972) to his detractors but not to dispute their attack on his factual accuracy. He argued that most of the contentions arose because for traditional literati nonfiction should not succeed—which his nonfiction obviously had.
wrote about in New York in a series on that city's sexual subculture. When it later became known that the character was distilled from a number of prostitutes, there was an outcry against Sheehy's method and, by extension, to the credibility of all of New Journalism. In the Wall Street Journal, one critic wrote:
Newsweek
reported that critics felt Sheehy's energies were better suited to fiction than fact. John Tebbel, in an article in Saturday Review, although treating New Journalism in its more generic sense as new a trend, chided it for the fictional technique of narrative leads which the new nonfiction writers had introduced into journalism and deplored its use in newspapers.
Jimmy Breslin
, who is often labelled a New Journalist, took the same view: "Believe me, there is no new journalism. It is a gimmick to say there is . . . Story telling is older than the alphabet and that is what it is all about."
Journalism
Journalism is the practice of investigation and reporting of events, issues and trends to a broad audience in a timely fashion. Though there are many variations of journalism, the ideal is to inform the intended audience. Along with covering organizations and institutions such as government and...
which used literary techniques deemed unconventional at the time. The term was codified with its current meaning by Tom Wolfe
Tom Wolfe
Thomas Kennerly "Tom" Wolfe, Jr. is a best-selling American author and journalist. He is one of the founders of the New Journalism movement of the 1960s and 1970s.-Early life and education:...
in a 1973 collection of journalism articles he published as The New Journalism
The New Journalism
The New Journalism is a 1973 anthology of journalism edited by Tom Wolfe and E. W. Johnson. The book is both a manifesto for a new type of journalism by Wolfe, and a collection of examples of New Journalism by American writers, covering a variety of subjects from the frivolous to the deadly serious...
, which included works by himself, Truman Capote
Truman Capote
Truman Streckfus Persons , known as Truman Capote , was an American author, many of whose short stories, novels, plays, and nonfiction are recognized literary classics, including the novella Breakfast at Tiffany's and the true crime novel In Cold Blood , which he labeled a "nonfiction novel." At...
, Hunter S. Thompson
Hunter S. Thompson
Hunter Stockton Thompson was an American journalist and author who wrote The Rum Diary , Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 .He is credited as the creator of Gonzo journalism, a style of reporting where reporters involve themselves in the action to...
, Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer
Norman Kingsley Mailer was an American novelist, journalist, essayist, poet, playwright, screenwriter, and film director.Along with Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Hunter S...
, Joan Didion
Joan Didion
Joan Didion is an American author best known for her novels and her literary journalism. Her novels and essays explore the disintegration of American morals and cultural chaos, where the overriding theme is individual and social fragmentation...
, Robert Christgau
Robert Christgau
Robert Christgau is an American essayist, music journalist, and self-proclaimed "Dean of American Rock Critics".One of the earliest professional rock critics, Christgau is known for his terse capsule reviews, published since 1969 in his Consumer Guide columns...
, and others.
Articles in the New Journalism style tended not to be found in newspapers, but rather in magazines such as The Atlantic Monthly
The Atlantic Monthly
The Atlantic is an American magazine founded in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1857. It was created as a literary and cultural commentary magazine. It quickly achieved a national reputation, which it held for more than a century. It was important for recognizing and publishing new writers and poets,...
, Harper's, CoEvolution Quarterly
CoEvolution Quarterly
CoEvolution Quarterly is a descendant of Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog. It eventually became the Whole Earth Review.-History:...
, Esquire
Esquire (magazine)
Esquire is a men's magazine, published in the U.S. by the Hearst Corporation. Founded in 1932, it flourished during the Great Depression under the guidance of founder and editor Arnold Gingrich.-History:...
, New York
New York (magazine)
New York is a weekly magazine principally concerned with the life, culture, politics, and style of New York City. Founded by Milton Glaser and Clay Felker in 1968 as a competitor to The New Yorker, it was brasher and less polite than that magazine, and established itself as a cradle of New...
, The New Yorker
The New Yorker
The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...
, Rolling Stone
Rolling Stone
Rolling Stone is a US-based magazine devoted to music, liberal politics, and popular culture that is published every two weeks. Rolling Stone was founded in San Francisco in 1967 by Jann Wenner and music critic Ralph J...
, and for a short while in the early 1970s, Scanlan's Monthly
Scanlan's Monthly
Scanlan's Monthly was a short-lived monthly publication, which ran from March 1970 to January 1971. Edited by Warren Hinckle III and Sidney Zion, it featured politically controversial muckraking and was ultimately subject to an investigation by the FBI during the Nixon administration. It was...
.
History
Various trends and tendencies throughout the history of American Journalism have been labeled "new journalism." Robert E. ParkRobert E. Park
Robert Ezra Park was an American urban sociologist, one of the main founders of the original Chicago School of sociology.-Life:...
, for instance, in his Natural History of the Newspaper, referred to the advent of the penny press
Penny press
Penny press newspapers were cheap, tabloid-style papers produced in the middle of the 19th century.- History :As the East Coast's middle and working classes grew, so did the new public’s desire for news. Penny papers emerged as a cheap source with coverage of crime, tragedy, adventure, and gossip...
in the 1830s as "new journalism." Likewise, the appearance of the yellow press
Yellow journalism
Yellow journalism or the yellow press is a type of journalism that presents little or no legitimate well-researched news and instead uses eye-catching headlines to sell more newspapers. Techniques may include exaggerations of news events, scandal-mongering, or sensationalism...
, papers such as Joseph Pulitzer
Joseph Pulitzer
Joseph Pulitzer April 10, 1847 – October 29, 1911), born Politzer József, was a Hungarian-American newspaper publisher of the St. Louis Post Dispatch and the New York World. Pulitzer introduced the techniques of "new journalism" to the newspapers he acquired in the 1880s and became a leading...
's New York World
New York World
The New York World was a newspaper published in New York City from 1860 until 1931. The paper played a major role in the history of American newspapers...
in the 1880s, led journalists and historians to proclaim that a "New Journalism" had been created. Ault and Emery, for instance, said "Industrialization and urbanization
Urbanization
Urbanization, urbanisation or urban drift is the physical growth of urban areas as a result of global change. The United Nations projected that half of the world's population would live in urban areas at the end of 2008....
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.'" In 1960, 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 sixties and seventies, the term enjoyed widespread popularity, often with meanings bearing manifestly little or no connection with one another. Although James E. Murphy noted that "...most uses of the term seem to refer to something 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 (reportage), alternative journalism ("modern muckraking"), 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.
Journalists recognized as using the style include Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer
Norman Kingsley Mailer was an American novelist, journalist, essayist, poet, playwright, screenwriter, and film director.Along with Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Hunter S...
, Joan Didion
Joan Didion
Joan Didion is an American author best known for her novels and her literary journalism. Her novels and essays explore the disintegration of American morals and cultural chaos, where the overriding theme is individual and social fragmentation...
, Truman Capote
Truman Capote
Truman Streckfus Persons , known as Truman Capote , was an American author, many of whose short stories, novels, plays, and nonfiction are recognized literary classics, including the novella Breakfast at Tiffany's and the true crime novel In Cold Blood , which he labeled a "nonfiction novel." At...
, P. J. O'Rourke
P. J. O'Rourke
Patrick Jake "P. J." O'Rourke is an American political satirist, journalist, writer, and author. O'Rourke is the H. L. Mencken Research Fellow at the Cato Institute and is a regular correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, The American Spectator, and The Weekly Standard, and frequent panelist on...
, George Plimpton
George Plimpton
George Ames Plimpton was an American journalist, writer, editor, and actor. He is widely known for his sports writing and for helping to found The Paris Review.-Early life:...
, Terry Southern
Terry Southern
Terry Southern was an American author, essayist, screenwriter and university lecturer, noted for his distinctive satirical style...
, and Gay Talese
Gay Talese
Gay Talese is an American author. He wrote for The New York Times in the early 1960s and helped to define literary journalism...
. Hunter S. Thompson
Hunter S. Thompson
Hunter Stockton Thompson was an American journalist and author who wrote The Rum Diary , Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 .He is credited as the creator of Gonzo journalism, a style of reporting where reporters involve themselves in the action to...
was a major practitioner of new journalism and gonzo journalism
Gonzo journalism
Gonzo journalism is a style of journalism that is written without claims of objectivity, often including the reporter as part of the story via a first-person narrative. The word "gonzo" is believed to be first used in 1970 to describe an article by Hunter S. Thompson, who later popularized the style...
, his own particular style. Thompson's first book, Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs, is a more conventional piece, and shows the beginnings of a more memoir-based approach to reportage. Gay Talese's 1966 article for Esquire, Frank Sinatra Has a Cold
Frank Sinatra Has a Cold
"Frank Sinatra Has a Cold" is a profile of Frank Sinatra written by Gay Talese for the April 1966 issue of Esquire. The article is one of the most famous pieces of magazine journalism and is often considered not only the greatest profile ever written of Frank Sinatra but one of the greatest...
, was an influential piece of new journalism that gave a detailed portrait of Frank Sinatra
Frank Sinatra
Francis Albert "Frank" Sinatra was an American singer and actor.Beginning his musical career in the swing era with Harry James and Tommy Dorsey, Sinatra became an unprecedentedly successful solo artist in the early to mid-1940s, after being signed to Columbia Records in 1943. Being the idol of the...
without ever interviewing him.
The psychedelic movement was something that many of the writers of the period covered, such as in Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is a work of literary journalism by Tom Wolfe, published in 1968. Using techniques from the genre of hysterical realism and pioneering new journalism, the "nonfiction novel" tells the story of Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters...
. The Vietnam War
Vietnam War
The Vietnam War was a Cold War-era military conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. This war followed the First Indochina War and was fought between North Vietnam, supported by its communist allies, and the government of...
was another common topic, as was the political turmoil on the homefront. Terry Southern
Terry Southern
Terry Southern was an American author, essayist, screenwriter and university lecturer, noted for his distinctive satirical style...
's Grooving in Chi documented the 1968 Chicago National Democratic Convention for Esquire
Esquire (magazine)
Esquire is a men's magazine, published in the U.S. by the Hearst Corporation. Founded in 1932, it flourished during the Great Depression under the guidance of founder and editor Arnold Gingrich.-History:...
in new journalism manner. New journalism's techniques were also applied to less obvious subjects, such as financial markets (by George Goodman
George Goodman
George Jerome Waldo Goodman , is an American economist, author, and broadcast economics commentator, best known by his pseudonym Adam Smith . He also writes fiction under the name "George Goodman."-Background, education, and career:Goodman was born in St...
under the pseudonym Adam Smith, in essays originally published in New York
New York (magazine)
New York is a weekly magazine principally concerned with the life, culture, politics, and style of New York City. Founded by Milton Glaser and Clay Felker in 1968 as a competitor to The New Yorker, it was brasher and less polite than that magazine, and established itself as a cradle of New...
magazine and later collected in a book called The Money Game.)
Some authors of conventional fiction switched to writing in the style of new journalism, such as Truman Capote
Truman Capote
Truman Streckfus Persons , known as Truman Capote , was an American author, many of whose short stories, novels, plays, and nonfiction are recognized literary classics, including the novella Breakfast at Tiffany's and the true crime novel In Cold Blood , which he labeled a "nonfiction novel." At...
's In Cold Blood
In Cold Blood (book)
In Cold Blood is a 1966 book by American author Truman Capote detailing the brutal 1959 murders of Herbert Clutter, a successful farmer from Holcomb, Kansas, his wife and two of their four children. Two older daughters no longer lived at the farm and were not there at the time of the murders...
, and Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer
Norman Kingsley Mailer was an American novelist, journalist, essayist, poet, playwright, screenwriter, and film director.Along with Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Hunter S...
's Armies of the Night
Armies of the Night
The Armies of the Night is a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning nonfiction novel written by Norman Mailer and sub-titled History as a Novel/The Novel as History. Mailer essentially creates his own genre for the narrative, split into historicized and novelized accounts of the October...
. However, neither author ever agreed to their style's comparison to Wolfe's school of narration, nor did many others who have been retrospectively promoted as being members and therein associated. Much to the contrary, many of these writers would deny that their work was generically relevant to other new journalists at the time.
Early development, the sixties
How and when the term New Journalism began to refer to a genre has not been clear. Tom WolfeTom Wolfe
Thomas Kennerly "Tom" Wolfe, Jr. is a best-selling American author and journalist. He is one of the founders of the New Journalism movement of the 1960s and 1970s.-Early life and education:...
, 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
Seymour Krim
Seymour Krim was an American author, editor and literary critic. He is often categorized with the writers of the Beat Generation...
, offered his explanation in 1973.
"I'm certain that [Pete] HamillPete HamillPete Hamill is an American journalist, novelist, essayist, editor and educator. Widely traveled and having written on a broad range of topics, he is perhaps best known for his career as a New York City journalist, as "the author of columns that sought to capture the particular flavors of New York...
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 TaleseGay TaleseGay Talese is an American author. He wrote for The New York Times in the early 1960s and helped to define literary journalism...
, WolfeTom WolfeThomas Kennerly "Tom" Wolfe, Jr. is a best-selling American author and journalist. He is one of the founders of the New Journalism movement of the 1960s and 1970s.-Early life and education:...
and BreslinJimmy BreslinJimmy Breslin is an American journalist and author. He currently writes a column for the New York Daily News' Sunday edition. He has written numerous novels, and columns of his have appeared regularly in various newspapers in his hometown of New York City...
. 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."
But wherever and whenever the term arose, there is evidence of some literary experimentation in the early 1960s, as when Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer
Norman Kingsley Mailer was an American novelist, journalist, essayist, poet, playwright, screenwriter, and film director.Along with Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Hunter S...
broke away from fiction to write Superman Comes to the Supermarket. A report of John F. Kennedy
John F. Kennedy
John Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy , often referred to by his initials JFK, was the 35th President of the United States, serving from 1961 until his assassination in 1963....
's nomination
1960 Democratic National Convention
The 1960 Democratic National Convention was held in Los Angeles. In the end, the Kennedy-Johnson ticket was assembled and went on to secure an electoral college victory and a narrow popular vote plurality in the fall over the Republican candidates Richard M...
that year, the piece established a precedent which Mailer would later build on in his 1968 convention
1960 Democratic National Convention
The 1960 Democratic National Convention was held in Los Angeles. In the end, the Kennedy-Johnson ticket was assembled and went on to secure an electoral college victory and a narrow popular vote plurality in the fall over the Republican candidates Richard M...
coverage (Miami and the Siege of Chicago
Miami and the Siege of Chicago
Miami and the Siege of Chicago: An Informal History of the Republican and Democratic Conventions of 1968 is a non-fiction novel written by Norman Mailer.-External links:* in Commentary...
) and in other nonfiction as well.
Wolfe wrote that his first acquaintance with a new style of reporting came in a 1962 Esquire
Esquire (magazine)
Esquire is a men's magazine, published in the U.S. by the Hearst Corporation. Founded in 1932, it flourished during the Great Depression under the guidance of founder and editor Arnold Gingrich.-History:...
article about Joe Louis
Joe Louis
Joseph Louis Barrow , better known as Joe Louis, was the world heavyweight boxing champion from 1937 to 1949. He is considered to be one of the greatest heavyweights of all time...
by Gay Talese
Gay Talese
Gay Talese is an American author. He wrote for The New York Times in the early 1960s and helped to define literary journalism...
. "'Joe Louis at Fifty' wasn't like a magazine article at all. It was like a short story. It began with a scene, 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
Harold Hayes
Harold Thomas Pace Hayes was a main architect of the New Journalism movement.-Biography:He was born on April 18, 1926 in North Carolina.He was an editor of Esquire magazine from 1963 to 1973...
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
New York (magazine)
New York is a weekly magazine principally concerned with the life, culture, politics, and style of New York City. Founded by Milton Glaser and Clay Felker in 1968 as a competitor to The New Yorker, it was brasher and less polite than that magazine, and established itself as a cradle of New...
, followed Esquire
The seventies
Much of the criticism favorable to this New Journalism came from the writers themselves. Talese and Wolfe, in a panel discussion cited earlier, 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
Intellectual
An intellectual is a person who uses intelligence and critical or analytical reasoning in either a professional or a personal capacity.- Terminology and endeavours :"Intellectual" can denote four types of persons:...
. They are scene-by-scene construction, full record of dialogue, third-person point of view and the manifold incidental details to round out character (i.e., descriptive incidentals). 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 JamesHenry JamesHenry James, OM was an American-born writer, regarded as one of the key figures of 19th-century literary realism. He was the son of Henry James, Sr., a clergyman, and the brother of philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice James....
and James JoyceJames JoyceJames Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century...
dreamed of but never achieved.
The essential difference between the new nonfiction and conventional reporting is, he said, that the basic unit of reporting was no longer the datum or piece of information but the scene. Scene is what underlies "the sophisticated strategies of prose."
Truman Capote
Truman Streckfus Persons , known as Truman Capote , was an American author, many of whose short stories, novels, plays, and nonfiction are recognized literary classics, including the novella Breakfast at Tiffany's and the true crime novel In Cold Blood , which he labeled a "nonfiction novel." At...
, whose 1965 best-seller, In Cold Blood
In Cold Blood (book)
In Cold Blood is a 1966 book by American author Truman Capote detailing the brutal 1959 murders of Herbert Clutter, a successful farmer from Holcomb, Kansas, his wife and two of their four children. Two older daughters no longer lived at the farm and were not there at the time of the murders...
, was a detailed narrative of the murder of a Kansas
Kansas
Kansas is a US state located in the Midwestern United States. It is named after the Kansas River which flows through it, which in turn was named after the Kansa Native American tribe, which inhabited the area. The tribe's name is often said to mean "people of the wind" or "people of the south...
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 every fact of its being true, every word of its 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
The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby
The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby is the title of Tom Wolfe's first collected book of essays, published in 1965...
, whose introduction and title story, according to James E. Murphy, "emerged as a manifest 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
Dan Wakefield
Dan Wakefield is an American novelist, journalist and screenwriter. His best-selling novels, Going All the Way and Starting Over were made into feature films...
acclaimed the nonfiction of Capote and Wolfe as elevating reporting to the level of literature, terming that work and some of Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer
Norman Kingsley Mailer was an American novelist, journalist, essayist, poet, playwright, screenwriter, and film director.Along with Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Hunter S...
's nonfiction a journalistic breakthrough: reporting "charged with the energy of art".
A review by Jack Newfield
Jack Newfield
Jack Newfield was a muckraking journalist, employed by The Village Voice, the Daily News and the New York Post. He covered the emergence of the New Left and the civil rights movement, and was a close friend of Robert F...
of Dick Schaap
Dick Schaap
Richard Jay Schaap was an American sportswriter, broadcaster, and author.-Early life and education:...
'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
The Pump House Gang
The Pump House Gang is a 1968 collection of essays and journalism by Tom Wolfe. The stories in the book explored various aspects of the counterculture of the 1960s...
and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is a work of literary journalism by Tom Wolfe, published in 1968. Using techniques from the genre of hysterical realism and pioneering new journalism, the "nonfiction novel" tells the story of Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters...
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
Gay Talese
Gay Talese is an American author. He wrote for The New York Times in the early 1960s and helped to define literary journalism...
in 1970, in his Author's Note to Fame and Obscurity
Fame and Obscurity
Fame and Obscurity: A Book About New York, a Bridge, and Celebrities on the Edge was a 1970 book by Gay Talese. The book was a collection of many of Talese's works for Esquire about New York City, and also includes his most famous celebrity profiles: "Joe Louis: The King as a Middle-aged Man",...
, 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.
De facto
De facto is a Latin expression that means "concerning fact." In law, it often means "in practice but not necessarily ordained by law" or "in practice or actuality, but not officially established." It is commonly used in contrast to de jure when referring to matters of law, governance, or...
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
New York (magazine)
New York is a weekly magazine principally concerned with the life, culture, politics, and style of New York City. Founded by Milton Glaser and Clay Felker in 1968 as a competitor to The New Yorker, it was brasher and less polite than that magazine, and established itself as a cradle of New...
detailing the growth of the new nonfiction and its techniques, Wolfe returned to the fortuitous circumstances surrounding the construction of Kandy-Kolored
The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby
The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby is the title of Tom Wolfe's first collected book of essays, published in 1965...
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...
The eighties
"Whatever happened to the New Journalism?" wondered Thomas Powers
Thomas Powers
Thomas Powers is an author, and an intelligence expert.He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 1971 together with Lucinda Franks for his articles on Weatherman member Diana Oughton...
in a 1975 issue of Commonweal
Commonweal
Commonweal is a American journal of opinion edited and managed by lay Catholics. It is headquartered in The Interchurch Center in New York City.-History:...
. In 1981, Joe Nocera published a postmortem in the Washington Monthly
The Washington Monthly
The Washington Monthly is a bimonthly nonprofit magazine of United States politics and government that is based in Washington, D.C.The magazine's founder is Charles Peters, who started the magazine in 1969 and continues to write the "Tilting at Windmills" column in each issue. Paul Glastris, former...
blaming its demise on the journalistic liberties taken by Hunter S. Thompson. Regardless of the culprit, less than a decade after Tom Wolfe's 1973 New Journalism anthology, the consensus was that New Journalism was dead.
Characteristics
As a literary genre, New Journalism has certain technical characteristics. It is an artistic, creative, literary reporting form with three basic traits: dramatic literary techniques; intensive reporting; and reporting of generally acknowledged subjectivity.As subjective journalism
Pervading many of the specific interpretations of New Journalism is a posture of subjectivity. Subjectivism is thus a common element among many (though not all) of its definitions. In contrast to a conventional journalistic striving for an objectivity, subjective journalism allows for the writer's opinion, ideas or involvement to creep into his story.Much of the critical literature concerns itself with a strain of subjectivism which may be called activism in news reporting. In 1970, Gerald Grant wrote disparagingly in Columbia Journalism Review
Columbia Journalism Review
The Columbia Journalism Review is an American magazine for professional journalists published bimonthly by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism since 1961....
of a "New Journalism of passion and advocacy" and in the Saturday Review Hohenberg discussed "The Journalist As Missionary" For Masterson in 1971, "The New Journalism" provided a forum for discussion of journalistic and social activism. In another 1971 article under the same title, Ridgeway called the counter-culture magazines such as The New Republic
The New Republic
The magazine has also published two articles concerning income inequality, largely criticizing conservative economists for their attempts to deny the existence or negative effect increasing income inequality is having on the United States...
and Ramparts
Ramparts (magazine)
Ramparts was an American political and literary magazine, published from 1962 through 1975.-History:Founded by Edward M. Keating as a Catholic literary quarterly, the magazine became closely associated with the New Left after executive editor Warren Hinckle hired Robert Scheer as managing editor...
and the American underground press New Journalism.
Another version of subjectivism in reporting is what is sometimes called participatory reporting. Robert Stein, in Media Power, defines New Journalism as "A form of participatory reporting that evolved in parallel with participatory politics
Participatory politics
Participatory politics or parpolity is a theoretical political system proposed by Stephen R. Shalom, professor of political science at William Paterson University in New Jersey....
..."
As form and technique
The above interpretations of New Journalism view it as an attitude toward the practice of journalism. But a significant portion of the critical literature deals with form and technique. Critical comment dealing with New Journalism as a literary-journalistic genre (a distinct type of category of literary work grouped according to similar and technical characteristics) treats it as the new nonfiction. Its traits are extracted from the criticism written by those who claim to practice it and by others. Admittedly it is hard to isolate from a number of the more generic meanings.The new nonfiction where sometimes taken for advocacy of subjective journalism. A 1972 article by Dennis Chase defines New Journalism as a subjective journalism emphasizing "truth" over "facts" but uses major nonfiction stylists as its example.
As intensive reportage
Although much of the critical literature discussed the use of literary or fictional techniques as the basis for a New Journalism, critics also referred to the form as stemming from intensive reporting. Stein, for instance, found the key to New Journalism not its fictionlike form but the "saturation reporting" which precedes it, the result of the writer's immersion in his subject. Consequently, Stein concluded, the writer is as much part of his story as is the subject and he thus linked saturation reporting with subjectivity. For him, New Journalism is inconsistent with objectivity or accuracy.However, others have argued that total immersion enhances accuracy. As Wolfe put the case:
I am the first to agree that the New Journalism should be as accurate as traditional journalism. In fact my claims for the New Journalism, and my demands upon it, go far beyond that. I contend that it has already proven itself more accurate than traditional journalism—which unfortunately is saying but so much...
Wolfe coined "saturation reporting" in his Bulletin of the American Society of Newspaper Editors
American Society of News Editors
The American Society of News Editors is a membership organization for editors, producers or directors in charge of journalistic organizations or departments, deans or faculty at university journalism schools, and leaders and faculty of media-related foundations and training organizations...
article. After citing the opening paragraphs of Talese's Joe Louis
Joe Louis
Joseph Louis Barrow , better known as Joe Louis, was the world heavyweight boxing champion from 1937 to 1949. He is considered to be one of the greatest heavyweights of all time...
piece, he confessed believing that Talese had "piped" or faked the story, only later to be convinced, after learning that Talese so deeply delved into the subject, that he could report entire scenes and dialogues.
The basic units of reporting are no longer who-what-when-where-how and why but whole scenes and stretches of dialogue. The New Journalism involves a depth of reporting and an attention to the most minute facts and details that most newspapermen, even the most experienced, have never dreamed of.
In his "Birth of the New Journalism" in New York
New York (magazine)
New York is a weekly magazine principally concerned with the life, culture, politics, and style of New York City. Founded by Milton Glaser and Clay Felker in 1968 as a competitor to The New Yorker, it was brasher and less polite than that magazine, and established itself as a cradle of New...
, Wolfe returned to the subject, which he here described as a depth of information never before demanded in newspaper work. The New Journalist, he said, must stay with his subject for days and weeks at a stretch. In Wolfe's Esquire piece, saturation became the "Locker Room Genre" of intensive digging into the lives and personalities of one's subject, in contrast to the aloof and genteel tradition of the essayists and "The Literary Gentlemen in the Grandstand."
For Talese, intensive reportage took the form of interior monologue to discover from his subjects what they were thinking, not, he said in a panel discussion reported in Writer's Digest
Writer's Digest
Writer's Digest is an American magazine devoted to both beginning and established writers, offering interviews, market listings, calls for manuscripts, and how-to articles....
, merely reporting what people did and said.
Wolfe identified the four main devices New Journalists borrowed from literary fiction
Fiction
Fiction is the form of any narrative or informative work that deals, in part or in whole, with information or events that are not factual, but rather, imaginary—that is, invented by the author. Although fiction describes a major branch of literary work, it may also refer to theatrical,...
:
- Telling the story using scenes rather than historical narrative as much as possible
- Dialogue in full (Conversational speech rather than quotations and statements)
- Point-of-view (present every scene through the eyes of a particular character)
- Recording everyday details such as behavior, possessions, friends and family (which indicate the "status life" of the character)
Despite these elements, New Journalism is not fiction. It maintains elements of reporting including strict adherence to factual accuracy and the writer being the primary source. To get "inside the head" of a character, the journalist asks the subject what they were thinking or how they felt.
Writers
It's hard to say definitively which writers are New Journalists. In The New Journalism: A Critical Perspective Murphy writes, "A a literary genre, New Journalism [...] involves a more or less honk defined group of writers [...]. Each is stylistically unique, but all sharing common formal elements." Among the most prominent writers of New Journalism, Murphy lists: Jimmy BreslinJimmy Breslin
Jimmy Breslin is an American journalist and author. He currently writes a column for the New York Daily News' Sunday edition. He has written numerous novels, and columns of his have appeared regularly in various newspapers in his hometown of New York City...
, Truman Capote
Truman Capote
Truman Streckfus Persons , known as Truman Capote , was an American author, many of whose short stories, novels, plays, and nonfiction are recognized literary classics, including the novella Breakfast at Tiffany's and the true crime novel In Cold Blood , which he labeled a "nonfiction novel." At...
, Joan Didion
Joan Didion
Joan Didion is an American author best known for her novels and her literary journalism. Her novels and essays explore the disintegration of American morals and cultural chaos, where the overriding theme is individual and social fragmentation...
, David Halberstam, Pete Hamill
Pete Hamill
Pete Hamill is an American journalist, novelist, essayist, editor and educator. Widely traveled and having written on a broad range of topics, he is perhaps best known for his career as a New York City journalist, as "the author of columns that sought to capture the particular flavors of New York...
, Larry King, Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer
Norman Kingsley Mailer was an American novelist, journalist, essayist, poet, playwright, screenwriter, and film director.Along with Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Hunter S...
, Joe McGinniss
Joe McGinniss
Joe McGinniss is an American author of nonfiction and novels. He first came to prominence with the best-selling The Selling of the President, 1968 which described the marketing of then-presidential candidate Richard Nixon, and has authored 11 works since that time...
, Rex Reed
Rex Reed
Rex Taylor Reed is an American film critic and former co-host of the syndicated television show At the Movies. He currently writes the column "On the Town with Rex Reed" for The New York Observer.-Life and career:...
, Mike Royko, John Sack
John Sack
John Sack was an American literary journalist and war correspondent. He was the only journalist to cover each American war over half a century.-Biography:...
, Dick Schaap
Dick Schaap
Richard Jay Schaap was an American sportswriter, broadcaster, and author.-Early life and education:...
, Terry Southern
Terry Southern
Terry Southern was an American author, essayist, screenwriter and university lecturer, noted for his distinctive satirical style...
, Gail Sheehy, Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson
Hunter S. Thompson
Hunter Stockton Thompson was an American journalist and author who wrote The Rum Diary , Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 .He is credited as the creator of Gonzo journalism, a style of reporting where reporters involve themselves in the action to...
, Dan Wakefield, and Tom Wolfe. In The New Journalism
The New Journalism
The New Journalism is a 1973 anthology of journalism edited by Tom Wolfe and E. W. Johnson. The book is both a manifesto for a new type of journalism by Wolfe, and a collection of examples of New Journalism by American writers, covering a variety of subjects from the frivolous to the deadly serious...
, Johnson and Wolfe, also includes George Plimpton for his Paper Lion
Paper Lion
Paper Lion, published in 1966, is a non-fiction book by prominent American writer George Plimpton.In 1960, Plimpton, not a professional athlete, arranged to pitch to a lineup of baseball stars in an All-Star exhibition, presumably to answer the question, "How would the average man off of the street...
, Life writer James Mills, Robert Christgau
Robert Christgau
Robert Christgau is an American essayist, music journalist, and self-proclaimed "Dean of American Rock Critics".One of the earliest professional rock critics, Christgau is known for his terse capsule reviews, published since 1969 in his Consumer Guide columns...
and a few others. Christgau, however, stated in an 2001 interview that he did not see himself as a New Journalist.
Editors
The editors Clay Felker and Harold Hayes also contributed to the rise of New Journalism.Criticism
While many praised the New Journalist's style of writing, Wolfe et al., also received severe criticism from contemporary journalists and writers. Essentially two different charges were leveled against New Journalism: criticism against it as a distinct genre and criticism against it as a new form.Robert Stein believed that "In the New Journalism the eye of the beholder is all—or almost all," and in 1971 Philip M. Howard, wrote that the new nonfiction writers rejected objectivity in favor of a more personal, subjective reportage. This parallels much of what Wakefield said in his 1966 Atlantic article.
The important and interesting and hopeful trend to me in the new journalism is its personal nature—not in the sense of personal attacks, but in the presence of the reporter himself and the significance of his own involvement. This is sometimes felt to be egotistical, and the frank identification of the author, especially as the "I" instead of merely the impersonal "eye" is often frowned upon and taken as proof of "subjectivity," which is the opposite of the usual journalistic pretense.
And in spite of the fact that Capote believed in the objective accuracy of In Cold Blood and strove to keep himself totally out of the narrative, one reviewer found in the book the "tendency among writers to resort to subjective sociology, on the other hand, or to super-creative reportage, on the other." Charles Self termed this characteristic of New Journalism as "admitted" subjectivity, whether first-person or third-person, and acknowledged the subjectivity inherent in his account.
Lester Markel polemically criticized New Journalism in the Bulletin of the American Society of Newspaper Editors
American Society of News Editors
The American Society of News Editors is a membership organization for editors, producers or directors in charge of journalistic organizations or departments, deans or faculty at university journalism schools, and leaders and faculty of media-related foundations and training organizations...
, he rejected the claim to greater in-depth reporting and labelled the writers "factual fictionists" and "deep-see reporters." He feared they were performing as sociologists and psychoanalysts rather than as journalists.
More reasoned, though still essentially negative, Arlen in his 1972 "Notes on the New Journalism," put the New Journalism into a larger socio-historical perspective by tracing the techniques from earlier writers and from the constraints and opportunities of the current age. But much of the more routine New Journalism "consists in exercises by writer . . . in gripping and controlling and confronting a subject within the journalist's own temperament. Presumably," he wrote, "this is the 'novelistic technique.'" However, he conceded that the best of this work had "considerably expanded the possibilities of journalism."
Much negative criticism of New Journalism were directed at individual writers. For example, Cynthia Ozick asserted in The New Republic
The New Republic
The magazine has also published two articles concerning income inequality, largely criticizing conservative economists for their attempts to deny the existence or negative effect increasing income inequality is having on the United States...
, that Capote in In Cold Blood was doing little more than trying to devise a form: "One more esthetic manipulation." Sheed offered, in "A Fun-House Mirror," a witty refutation of Wolfe's claim that he takes on the expression and the guise of whomever he is writing about. "The Truman Capotes may hold up a tolerably clear glass to nature," he wrote, "but Wolfe holds up a fun-house mirror, and I for one don't give a hoot whether he calls the reflection fact or fiction."
"Parajournalism" and the New Yorker affair
Among the hostile critics of the New Journalism were Dwight MacDonaldDwight Macdonald
Dwight Macdonald was an American writer, editor, film critic, social critic, philosopher, and political radical.-Early life and career:...
, whose most vocal criticism compromised a chapter in what became known as "the New Yorker affair" of 1965. Wolfe had written a two-part semi-fictional parody in New York of The New Yorker
The New Yorker
The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...
and its editor, William Shawn
William Shawn
William Shawn was an American magazine editor who edited The New Yorker from 1952 until 1987.-Education and Early Life:...
. Reaction notably from New Yorker writers, was loud and prolonged, but the most significant reaction came from MacDonald, who counterattacked in two articles in the New York Review of Books. In the first, MacDonald termed Wolfe's approach "parajournalism" and applied it to all similar styles. "Parajournalism," MacDonald wrote,
... seems to be journalism—"the collection and dissemination of current news"—but the appearance is deceptive. It is a bastard form, having it both ways, exploiting the factual authority of journalism and the atmospheric license of fiction.
The New Yorker parody, he added, "... revealed the ugly side of Parajournalism when it tries to be serious."
In his second article, MacDonald addressed himself to the accuracy of Wolfe's report. He charged that Wolfe "takes a middle course, shifting gears between fact and fantasy, spoof and reportage, until nobody knows which end is, at the moment, up". New Yorker writers Renata Adler
Renata Adler
Renata Adler is an American author, journalist and film critic.-Background and education:Adler was born in Milan, Italy, and grew up in Danbury, Connecticut. After gaining a B.A. in philosophy and German from Bryn Mawr, Adler studied for an M.A. in Comparative Literature at Harvard under I. A...
and Gerald Jonas joined the fray in the Winter 1966 issue of Columbia Journalism Review.
Wolfe himself returned to the affair a full seven years later, devoting the second of his two February New York articles (1972) to his detractors but not to dispute their attack on his factual accuracy. He argued that most of the contentions arose because for traditional literati nonfiction should not succeed—which his nonfiction obviously had.
Gail Sheehy and "Redpants"
In The New Journalism: A Critical Perspective, Murphy writes, "Partly because Wolfe took liberties with the facts in his New Yorker parody, New Journalism began to get a reputation for juggling the facts in the search for truth, fictionalizing some details to get a larger 'reality.'" Widely criticized was the technique of the composite character, the most notorious example of which was "Redpants," a presumed prostitute whom Gail SheehyGail Sheehy
Gail Sheehy is an American writer and lecturer, most notable for her books on life and the life cycle. She is also a contributor to Vanity Fair magazine....
wrote about in New York in a series on that city's sexual subculture. When it later became known that the character was distilled from a number of prostitutes, there was an outcry against Sheehy's method and, by extension, to the credibility of all of New Journalism. In the Wall Street Journal, one critic wrote:
It's all part of the New Journalism, or the Now Journalism, and it's practiced widely these days. Some editors and reporters vigorously defend it. Others just as vigorously attack it. No one has polled the reader, but whether he approves or disapproves, it's getting harder and harder for him to know what he can believe.
Newsweek
Newsweek
Newsweek is an American weekly news magazine published in New York City. It is distributed throughout the United States and internationally. It is the second-largest news weekly magazine in the U.S., having trailed Time in circulation and advertising revenue for most of its existence...
reported that critics felt Sheehy's energies were better suited to fiction than fact. John Tebbel, in an article in Saturday Review, although treating New Journalism in its more generic sense as new a trend, chided it for the fictional technique of narrative leads which the new nonfiction writers had introduced into journalism and deplored its use in newspapers.
Criticism against New Journalism as a distinct genre
Newfield, in 1972, changed his attitude since his earlier, 1967, review of Wolfe. "New Journalism does not exist," the later article titled "Is there a 'new journalism'?" says. "It is a false category. There is only good writing and bad writing, smart ideas and dumb ideas, hard work and laziness." While the practice of journalism had improved during the past fifteen years, he argued, it was because of an influx of good writers notable for unique styles, not because they belonged to any school or movement.Jimmy Breslin
Jimmy Breslin
Jimmy Breslin is an American journalist and author. He currently writes a column for the New York Daily News' Sunday edition. He has written numerous novels, and columns of his have appeared regularly in various newspapers in his hometown of New York City...
, who is often labelled a New Journalist, took the same view: "Believe me, there is no new journalism. It is a gimmick to say there is . . . Story telling is older than the alphabet and that is what it is all about."
See also
- Creative nonfictionCreative nonfictionCreative nonfiction is a genre of writing that uses literary styles and techniques to create factually accurate narratives. Creative nonfiction contrasts with other nonfiction, such as technical writing or journalism, which is also rooted in accurate fact, but is not primarily written in service...
- Gonzo JournalismGonzo journalismGonzo journalism is a style of journalism that is written without claims of objectivity, often including the reporter as part of the story via a first-person narrative. The word "gonzo" is believed to be first used in 1970 to describe an article by Hunter S. Thompson, who later popularized the style...
- New Games Journalism
- The New JournalismThe New JournalismThe New Journalism is a 1973 anthology of journalism edited by Tom Wolfe and E. W. Johnson. The book is both a manifesto for a new type of journalism by Wolfe, and a collection of examples of New Journalism by American writers, covering a variety of subjects from the frivolous to the deadly serious...
- Nonfiction novel
- Reportage
Further reading
- Of honest men & good writers Jack NewfieldJack NewfieldJack Newfield was a muckraking journalist, employed by The Village Voice, the Daily News and the New York Post. He covered the emergence of the New Left and the civil rights movement, and was a close friend of Robert F...
making the case against New Journalism as a distinct genre in a Village Voice article published May 18, 1972