What is New Journalism? Exploring Fiction and Immersion In Feature Stories
Before I started writing non-fiction, I was obsessed with journalism. Though I remembered many years as an avid reader of novels, I found myself during adolescence and early adulthood reaching for magazines or tuning into 60 Minutes. Journalism, specifically longform, created a space where questions and truths within real stories could be questioned, crafted, and explored through gripping narratives filled with characters and structure choices. As I dived into the depths of nonfiction writing, a genre that’s continuing to grow in areas of form and content, my interests moved towards the profiles and reportage. Though I skipped J-school, my MFA coupled with experiences in editorial and broadcast newsrooms led me to dive deeper into the world of long-form reporting, specifically new journalism.
What is New Journalism?
New Journalism, sometimes described as Literary Journalism, is defined as a form of writing that closely resembles newspaper and magazine writing. Although fact-driven, heavily researched, and usually requiring interviews, these journalistic works allow the writer to get so close to the subject which they’re exploring that the writing enters a literary category. The usually distant, even-handed voice now could play with structures, scenes, and point-of-view.
Tom Wolfe championed the term in a 1973 anthology titled The New Journalism, with articles by pioneers Truman Capote, Joan Didion, and Gay Talese. These writers, along with several others, paved a way for generations of investigative and literary reporting. While some may debate on the necessity of naming these long-form reported pieces as new journalism, associating these works with phrases like ‘new’ and ‘literary’ not so much distinguishes a level of art but rather the literary elements to develop a style to tell true stories in a fictive, compelling way that allows readers to empathize with or act upon a social situation.
Immersive Reporting
What attracted a readership to the works of New Journalism was the way in which stories were promoted as immersive investigative reporting that read like fiction. The experimental style allowed many writers who took part of the genre to develop their own unique style of writing, as well as convey a unique perspective on a social situation within the time period.
Though many elements of fiction writing are present in the style, the heart of these pieces lies in reporting. Writers relied on extensive interviews to create backstory and dialogue, but also as a way to fully flesh out the subjects, setting, and characters of the piece. Extended time spent observing, interviewing, and living with these characters allowed for the writer to become the closest eyewitness to the situation and story. With this saturated reporting, they could reconstruct the subject’s world to convey perspectives as closely as possible.
Fictive Elements
Point of view defines much of the experimental nature of New Journalism. As writers saturate themselves with its subject, these reporters understood that they would be reporting with their own biases. Rather than reporting from a distance, though, these writers included their voice as the observant narrator who could recount, report, and recreate the scene-by-scene moments about a topic or character that would propose a perspective about a situation to readers. Point of views may switch between first-person or third-person, allowing writers to keep the stories entertaining for readers.
New Journalism writing reads like fiction, in that the reporting moves through a scene-by-scene pace to keep readers captivated and moved throughout the work. Whether a profile on an artist like Frank Sinatra or an account of a true-crime murder in Kansas, these pieces found new ways to use dialogue and setting to critique or explore social commentaries for an audience. Writers recounted each town, living room, or street view with such detail that readers could feel as though they were walking along with these characters and could understand how their environment might shape the characters’ perspectives. To further round out the subject, writers also knew when dialogue captured the personality or essence of the characters. Including conversations, parts of speeches, or even lack of dialogue allowed readers to further emphasize and examine the characters that created the story.
This immersive, obsessive style of reporting moved readers because of how clearly New Journalism displayed a social commentary. What made new journalism new was not its subjects or its length, but rather the work’s ability to allow social commentary to sit with and affect its audience. These writers not only asked for readers to hear the facts of a story, but to empathize and try to understand their perspective. Readers walk away from the work forced to confront their own biases or thinking, and perhaps move to act.
New Journalism continues to reshape and transform with new generations of writers and readers. Whether in the form of Vogue profiles or a collection of essays, we are now more than ever able to witness and observe multiple ways of witnessing the people and places surrounding us, and the social norms or world events that affect us. While we look back on where the genre started, the work of New Journalism will only continue growing.
A Reader’s Guide to New Journalism
Craft Books
The New New Journalism: Conversations with America's Best Nonfiction Writers on Their Craft By Robert S. Boynton
Telling True Stories: A Nonfiction Writers' Guide from the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University Edited by Mark Kramer and Wendy Call
Recommended Reading
Life Stories: Profiles From The New Yorker Edited by David Remnick
Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion
Three Women by Lisa Taddeo
