The New Journalism

Historical Context of New Journalism

The standard of 'objectivity' in journalism as we know it only ever achieved its popular commercial status because news wires depended on the legitimacy of their stories in order to sell them on to newspapers. The Associated Press would go out and gather information and found that the only way to make it profitable was to present it quite blandly, which gave individual news organisation a blank slate to put their own spin on it. To put any slant on it themselves would make it really hard to sell to a wholesale market.

The 'first' new journalism was the Yellow Press - so named because of the bidding war between two papers for a popular cartoon called 'The Yellow Boy'. The Yellow Press was the name given to the sensationalist tabloid style newspapers owned by Hearst and Pulitzer in the late 19^th century. They were often emblazoned with huge, emotive headlines with big striking pictures, which doesn't sound all that different to what you'd see at a newsagents today. 

The agenda was driven by exclusives, sob stories, dramatic stories, romance, shock and crime. Many people called this first wave of New Journalism the 'New Journalism without a soul' because all the stories were about sin, sex and violence.

The era in which Wolfe and Truman Capote did some of their best work was during a time of incredible change. America in the 60s and 70s was similar in this way to the day of Hearst and Pulitzer – there was a great deal of political and social upheaval, and fighting in foreign lands with ever more serious military threats. It was an extremely fearful and paranoid time; young people had the military draft for the Vietnam War constantly hanging over them and everybody else lived in fear of nuclear annihilation from the Red Threat.

The assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963 was a massive blow to the collective consciousness of America and any hopes they had had riding on him. Kennedy was handsome, young and intelligent. He was essentially the President Obama of the day – someone symbolic of the hope for change. The war in Vietnam was a disaster and nobody really seemed to know why they were there. Muhammed Ali refused the conscript, and was quoted as saying: “I ain't got no quarrel with them Viet Cong.”

Among all this darkness, people everywhere were understandably feeling rebellious. Protests were happening worldwide for civil rights, both for women and different ethnicities. The advent of the contraceptive pill, coupled with the publishing Reich's work which completely refuted Freud and said that sexual desires must be expressed freely without recrimination, led to the sexual revolution that carried on throughout the decades. There was a general anti-establishment feeling and this very much began to seep in to journalism, breaking the bland narrative style of non-tabloid newspapers of the day.

Most journalists at the time tended to report in a very formulaic way, but the New Journalism was an attempt to record things in a way that mirrored the language and the style of the events. It allowed the feeling of a place and time to bleed in to the copy, rather than keeping it at arm's length and doggedly attempting to stay whatever their interpretation of 'objective' was, in the face of telling a story.

It was then that journalists started to question whether relying on press releases, official statements from the establishment and bought-in stories could ever really be called objective, or a true reflection of the events. They began to experiment with interpretive reporting, focusing on setting, plot, sounds, feelings, direct quotes and images, while still making sure that the facts were straight.

This sort of journalism was much more personal, and expressed an individual's point of view as opposed to that of a faceless, seemingly all-knowing mass. It was due to this highly personal nature that it irritated a lot of people and was regarded as quite controversial.

New Journalism: Show and Tell, Gonzo Journalism

Think of a very old newspaper article or a BBC News Bulletin around the time when radio was cutting edge technology, and you'll think of a posh old man dryly reading out events in an 'impartial' tone. Tom Wolfe, a journalist who influences the way in which we tell a story even to this day, highlighted this and said that it was just plain wrong. Tom Wolfe literally write the book on 'The New Journalism.'

Tom Wolfe speaking at the White House

Tom reckoned that since we're only human, we're not infallible; but to adopt this boring, beige narrator voice is almost to claim that we're somehow omniscient in our coverage of a certain event. He asked why a situation shouldn't influence the reporter – if the reporter is reporting on something exciting, then why should it be a crime to affect an excited tone?

He was a great fan of Emile Zola, the famous French photojournalist, saying that Zola had “crowned himself as the first scientific novelist, a “naturalist” to use his term, studying the human fauna.”

It is this obsession with people and interesting details that made Tom Wolfe himself such an engaging writer. He would set the scene with small details that would help a reader to get a feel for what the reporter was seeing and feeling – details like the colour of the curtains, the smell in the air, what shoes somebody might be wearing.

He outlines how journalists and indeed all writers can improve their writing through these four points:

Scene by scene construction.

Never rely on second-hand information and sources. Writing is much easier if you go out and actually experience an event first hand to then relay back to the reader.

Dialogue.
Dialogue is important, therefore it should be recorded and subsequently reported as fully as possible. It sounds more real, engages the reader more, and gives the speaker character.

The third person.
Treat the people involved in an article as if they are protagonists in a novel. Ask them how they are feeling, why they are here and what they are thinking so that you can report without speculation what their motivation is and what they are thinking, but without it being 'in their voice.' It gives the reader a feeling of the people and the events involved and is much easier to digest than vanilla facts.

Status details.
The “social autopsy” - comment on what people have chosen to surround themselves with, how they treat their peers, their children, their subordinates; the colour of the curtains and what kind of shoes they are wearing as mentioned before. Allows to reader to get even more of a feel of the person's character.

So: whenever you read a newspaper article where the author spends a paragraph introducing the scene rather than launching straight in to the classic inverted pyramid of who, what and when, they have taken a leaf out of Tom's book. One article I read recently was describing the poor conditions of a council flat in Southampton. Although the journalist did include pictures of the damage and decay, the words he used gave the reader an even more succinct feeling of the bleak situation the protagonists (those unfortunate enough to live in that flat) found themselves in.

The 'new' journalist will, apparently, sacrifice objectivity in the face of subjective experience. Performance journalism is entertaining to watch; it's in the name. It includes people like Michael Moore and Morgan Spurlock, the bloke who did 'Supersize Me'. The enjoyment of their programmes doesn't really stem from any controversial facts that they might uncover, but just from watching them going out and physically doing stuff, whether its Moore shouting at a building or Spurlock chundering Big Mac slurry all over the side of his car.

'Gonzo' journalism is a highly prized sort of performance journalism. Those attempting it have no pretence of objectivity: Gonzo favours personality and 'grit' over a polished end product. It has a fly-on-the-wall, authentic sort of quality to it.

Hunter S. Thompson penned the famous novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which was also adapted in to a film. Thompson believed that journalists shouldn't separate themselves from the action, but actively participate in it. He wrote a book about the Hell's Angels after living and riding with them for over a year, a true Gonzo journalist in every sense of the word. He did copious amounts of drugs and wrote about drug use extensively in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

Louis Theroux is a good example of an incredibly good modern gonzo journalist. If he decides to do something about Neo-Nazis, he will literally rock up to a Neo-Nazi camp and spend some time with them. People find other people fascinating, even if those people in question are hateable, and following them around with a camera gives a viewer an insight in to these people's minds that they won't be able to get anywhere else.

New journalism is, in essence, all about people. While doing a load of drugs and driving down the road at 90 miles per hour isn't really my cup of tea, I'm definitely a believer of at least one of the core tenets of New Journalism. That if you want to write about something convincingly, go out and experience it for yourself. How can anyone argue with that?