New Journalism
New Journalism is a style of news writing and journalism, developed in the 1960s and 1970s, that uses literary techniques unconventional at the time. It is characterized by a subjective perspective, a literary style reminiscent of long-form non-fiction. Using extensive imagery, reporters interpolate subjective language within facts whilst immersing themselves in the stories as they reported and wrote them. In traditional journalism, the journalist is "invisible"; facts are meant to be reported objectively.[1]
For the anthology book, see The New Journalism.
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, Terry Southern, Robert Christgau, Gay Talese and others.
Articles in the New Journalism style tended not to be found in newspapers, but 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.
Contemporary journalists and writers questioned the "currency" of New Journalism and its qualification as a distinct genre. The subjective nature of New Journalism received extensive exploration: one critic suggested the genre's practitioners functioned more as sociologists and psychoanalysts than as journalists. Criticism has been leveled at numerous individual writers in the genre, as well.
Writers and editors[edit]
There is little consensus on which writers can be definitively categorized as New Journalists. In The New Journalism: A Critical Perspective, Murphy writes that New Journalism "involves a more or less well defined group of writers," who are "stylistically unique" but share "common formal elements".[52] Among the most prominent New Journalists, Murphy lists: Jimmy Breslin, Truman Capote, Joan Didion, David Halberstam, Pete Hamill, Larry L. 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.[52] In The New Journalism, the editors E.W Johnson and Tom Wolfe, include George Plimpton for Paper Lion, Life writer James Mills and Robert Christgau, et cetera, in the corps. Christgau, however, stated in a 2001 interview that he does not see himself as a New Journalist.[64]
The editors Clay Felker, Normand Poirier and Harold Hayes also contributed to the rise of New Journalism.