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.
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 and writer 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".Park 1967 , p. 93. 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 "[i]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.'Ault & Emery 1959, p. 11. John Hohenberg, in The Professional Journalist (1960), 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."Hohenberg 1960, p. 322.
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",Murphy 1974, p. 2 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."MacDougal 1971, p. v.
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.Dennis ed. The Magic Writing Machine. (1971) see also The New Journalism in America. Dennis & Rivers eds (1974). Michael Johnson's The New Journalism addresses itself to three phenomena: the underground press, the artists of nonfiction, and changes in the established media.Johnson 1971
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.
First usage
Matthew Arnold 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."Quoted in Harold Begbie, "The Life of General William Booth" , (2 vols., New York, 1920). Available [online] Stead himself called his brand of journalism 'Government by Journalism'.
Early development, 1960s
Tom Wolfe, a practitioner and principal advocate of the form, wrote in at least two articles"The Birth of 'The New Journalism'; Eyewitness Report by Tom Wolfe", New York, February 14, 1972. p. 45"Why They Aren't Writing the Great American Novel Anymore", Esquire, December 1972, p. 152. 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 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."In a private letter to James E. Murphy, dated February 6, 1973 (see Murphy 1974, p. 5.)
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 (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 that began an intimate confrontation between Louis and his third wife.Wolfe. "The New Journalism" Bulletin of the American Society of Newspaper Editors. September, 1970. 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."Hayes ed., 1970, p. xxi. Soon others, notably New York, followed Esquires lead, and the style eventually reached other magazines and then books.Murphy 1974, p. 5.
A few somewhat less playful 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"Esquire, pp. 152–159, 272–280 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).Esquire, p. 158. 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.Esquire, p. 272.
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".Esquire, p. 278.
The first of the new breed of nonfiction writers to receive wide notoriety was Truman Capote,Murphy 1974, p. 7. 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.See for example. J. Howard, "Six Year Literary Virgil", Life, January 7, 1966: George Plimpton, "Story behind a Nonfiction Novel", The New York Times Book Review, January 16, 1966: G. Hicks, "Story of an American Tragedy", Saturday Review, January 22, 1966: Neil Compton, "Hyjinks' Journalism", Commentary, February, 1966. 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 impactCapote, as quoted by Roy Newquist, Counterpoint, (Rand McNally, 1964), p. 78.
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.