The New Journalism

The New Journalism is the name of a book by Tom Wolfe.  It also describes the changes that took place in journalistic style from the early 1960s onward.

Journalistic writing pre the early 1960s had always been deliberately dry, attempting to give the facts of a case in a manner that was scientific and accurate, but was devoid of personality.  The reasons for this were many, not least due to the belief that by allowing personality into news reports, they could not be impartial.

In the 1960's some brave new journalists began experimenting with the tools used by novelists to inject personality into their writing, in an attempt to increase reader engagement.

Several masterpieces were created.  Not least Truman Capote's In Cold Blood and later Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

In The New Journalism, Wolfe argues that the four key devices that New Journalism took from fiction writers were:

1. Scene by scene construction - tell the story in a filmic, scene by scene progression.
2. Full and faithful recording of the dialog - include each character's hesitations, retractions and repetitions.
3. Third-person point of view - present each scene through the eyes of a particular character
4. Record a person's mannerisms, gestures, clothing and furniture - in doing so you show a great deal of how a person interacts with the world around them.

New Journalism continues to be popular today.  Indeed, some modern feature writers use the techniques of New Journalism without knowing or thinking about where those techniques originated from.