In 1972, Tom Wolfe defined what he called the New Journalism in two seminal articles in New York magazine, “The Birth of the New Journalism: Eyewitness Report” and “The New Journalism: A la Recherche des Whichy Thickets” (maddeningly unavailable on the web). Here’s how he described the idealized old journalism in the former:
“God knows I didn’t have anything new in mind, much less anything literary, when I took my first newspaper job. I had a fierce and unnatural craving for something else entirely. Chicago, 1928, that was the general idea ... Drunken reporters out on the ledge of the News peeing into the Chicago River at dawn ... Nights down at the saloon listening to “Back of the Stockyards” being sung by a baritone who was only a lonely blind bulldyke with lumps of milk glass for eyes ... Nights down at the detective bureau—it was always nighttime in my daydreams of the newspaper life. Reporters didn’t work during the day. I wanted the whole movie, nothing left out ...”
Wolfe goes on to describe the reality of the 1962 New York Herald Tribune as “wreckage and exhaustion everywhere… painted over in an industrial sludge…” populated with scoop reporters and his fellow feature writers.
From the 1930s through the early 1960s, the novel was the holy grail for the then unnamed creative class. The day’s novelists came seemingly from an obscure nowhere, Wolfe observed: “The author, you would be assured, was previously employed as a hod carrier (Steinbeck), a truck dispatcher (Cain), a bellboy (Wright), a Western Union boy (Saroyan), a dishwasher in a Greek restaurant in New York (Faulkner), a truck driver, logger, berry picker, spindle cleaner, crop duster, pilot ... There was no end to it ... Some novelists had whole strings of these credentials ... That way you knew you were getting the real goods ....” Journalists were allowed in the club (New York’s White Horse Tavern on Hudson and 11th) only as would-be novelists. “There was no such thing as a literary journalist working for popular magazines or newspapers.
In the early 1960s it became possible, Wolfe wrote, “to write journalism that would ... read like a novel. Like a novel, if you get the picture.” It wasn’t a novel, of course, but close enough to do in a pinch until the journalist worked up enough nerve to join the big leagues. “They were dreamers, all right, but one thing they never dreamed of. They never dreamed of the approaching irony. They never guessed for a minute that the work they would do over the next ten years, as journalists, would wipe out the novel as literature’s main event.” It became possible, Wolfe reported, to “write accurate non-fiction with techniques usually associated with novels and short stories. It was that—plus. It was the discovery that it was possible in non-fiction, in journalism, to use any literary device, from the traditional dialogisms of the essay to stream-of-consciousness, and to use many different kinds simultaneously, or within a relatively short space ... to excite the reader both intellectually and emotionally.”
It was, well, exciting. It had, as Wolfe articulated as he explained his Hectoring Narrator, a point-of-view. Boy, did it ever. The writing form introduced a sort of interaction on the part of the reader, or at least the realization that the reader should be something more than “be expected to just lie flat and let these people come tromping through as if his mind were a subway turnstile.”
The writing form Wolfe buttonholed was a reaction to the calm background narration referred to at the time as understatement. By the early 1960s the understated narrator had become phlegmatically boring. “Readers were bored to tears without understanding why, wrote Wolfe. “When they came upon that pale beige tone, it began to signal to them, unconsciously, that a well-known bore was here again, ‘the journalist,’ a pedestrian mind, a phlegmatic spirit, a faded personality, and there was no way to get rid of the pallid little troll, short of ceasing to read.” The New Journalism narration thrived on dialog and even natural accent. Involvement—even if pseudo-involvement—became the narrative innovation. Wolfe called this the downstage voice, “as if characters downstage from the protagonist himself were talking.”
The same thing happened with descriptions and the interior character monologues. The point-of-view shifted from a bland narrator to an active participant. “I would shift as quickly as possible,” Wolfe wrote, “into the eye sockets, as it were, of the people in the story.” The very eye sockets. Every detail—every minute part of every detail—was of utmost importance. This took time. The idea was to give the objective facts of course, but to go further—to tell the character’s story in the deepest subjective, yet wildly accurate, terms possible. The deepest honesty attainable.
Well, guess what. That beige writing form to which the New Journalism reacted has returned. Worse than it ever was. Corporate journalism has become as boring and as pale as it was 45 years ago. Worse, modern independent journalism has become almost as watery and uninspired.
There are glimmers of an undercurrent of a return to innovative and experimental writing. And it’s all happening online, in what’s come to be called social media. A breaking of what Orwell called “the Geneva conventions of the mind,” a protocol of writing that’s so dull as to be stifling. Like grass seeds sprouting after a spring rain, the muck of uninspired protocols and false balance of providing stenographic service for both sides is beginning to wash away. Again. Oh my god, writers are actually beginning to think while observing again. They’re not just taking notes.
Here’s how you can play:
Begin by reading the early- to mid-1960s work of the New Journalism masters: Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Jimmy Breslin, Tom Gallagher, Robert Benton, Robert Christgau, Doon Arbus, Brock Brower, Joan Didion, Hunter Thompson Terry Southern and James Baldwin’s and Norman Mailer’s non-fiction work.
Next seek out the best social media practitioners that are only now emerging. Start by following Jay Rosen’s twitterfeed, Jeff Jarvis‘s best posts, most of Dan Gillmor‘s, the bits of David Weinberger‘s that aren’t toss-offs, Kevin Kelly‘s Lifestream, and Dave Winer‘s posts on media and publishing. There are others—many, many others—but those are enough to get started.
Finally, study Dan Gillmor’s “Principles for a New Media Literacy.” It’s not that there’s anything groundbreaking in Gillmor’s essay; rather it’s a concise and well-articulated statement of what you need to know to play in this sandbox.
0 responses. Comments closed for this article.