New Journalism

So there's this thing called journalism. I quite like it, it's useful for news and investigations and... stuff but at some point in the 60s at a time of political and social upheaval a group of journalists changed how journalism works (sort of... but we'll get on to that). Tom Wolfe wrote a book called The New Journalism but this doesn't mean that he started the movement because the majority of the book was a collection of new journalism articles. My knowledge of new journalism really comes from the Gonzo Journalism of Hunter S. Thompson who was not the first person to write in a gonzo style but was one of the most successful. His book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas which was turned in to a very successful film (especially if we're measuring success by how much Johnny Depp your film has) was a great example of Gonzo journalism as we follow Thompson in the guise of Raoul Duke and his attorney Dr. Gonzo or The Samoan. Thompson was sent to cover two events for Rolling Stone magazine and yet what he actually covered were his and Dr. Gonzo's exploits while off their faces on a cocktail of drugs and probably cocktails. Thompson's only complaint about Fear and Loathing was that it wasn't Gonzo enough; he took events that happened a month or two apart and condensed them into a couple of days. For better examples of gonzo-ness, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail is, (according to my friend George whose blog on this is much better as it was his seminar paper and a subject he's passionate about) much better.

New journalism is not strictly an American thing but that is where it comes from. Today new journalism can come from anywhere but it is important when looking at the origins of new journalism to consider American journalism's history. After the creation of wire services like the Associated Press, these companies realised to sell their product of news to other outlets, they needed to be objective, so objectivity became the name of the game in journalism. It was the strict Five W's: Who, What, When, Where and Why. What followed was the Yellow Press. The battle between William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer (of Pulitzer Prize fame). The struggle between the two was a real power struggle in the US, running emotive headlines with big, striking pictures. There were exclusives, dramatic stories, romantic stories, shocking stories and crime stories; all the same sort of things you'd get in the Sun today. America then in the 60s and 70s felt similar to the time of the Yellow Press. It was a time of great social and political upheaval with Vietnam, the Cold War, Communism and Civil Rights looming over the people of America. Journalists of the time were recording these events in the same formulaic way they had been doing since journalism became a thing that people did, the new journalism was an attempt to record events in a way that mirrored the language and style of the events themselves; let it bleed into the copy. It was a part of the whole anti establishment movement of the 60s and the idea that "there is a policeman inside your head - he must be destroyed," seeped into journalism. The objectivity question came up again as journos questioned whether only basing stories on press releases was really objective. Spoiler alert: it isn't. Interpretive reporting began with journalists like Truman Capote, Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer who are examples of the New Breed.

Journalism moved from "seeing" to "telling" as narration in journalism moved from Diegetic to Mimetic; objectivity was junked in favour of subjective experience so as in the previously mentioned Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, it was more about Hunter S. Thompson's personal experience in Vegas than it was the events he was sent to cover. This eventually took us to the "Performance Journalism" of Michael Moore and Morgan Spurlock in Supersize Me and to a lesser extent Louis Theroux. Journalism became a lot more about real dialogue between people. Not just quotes from speeches and interviews but dialogue between people. In the seminar we talked about a hatchet job a journalist in Rolling Stone magazine had done on John McCain in the run up to the presidential election which Obama subsequently won, and in the way that most journalists (myself included) overstate their personal influence, the dialogue between McCain and his wife which did not show him in a particularly good light could have been a deciding factor in the elections.

For now I think we're done with New Journalism. It's not dead but it seems to be far less popular than it was at its zenith. With characters like Michael Moore and Louis Theroux still producing thought provoking content though there could still be hope for a strand of journalism which at one time looked like it was going to take over the world.

Until Next Time. Stay Classy Internet.