New Journalism

Tom Wolfe, the creator of the term 'New Journalism', started his career as a features writer for the New York Herald Tribune. Competition was fierce between feature writers. but as was commonly the case, they would run out of material by week 9 or 10 of the job, reverting then to the odd funny thing that happened around the house the other day a they squirmed and gasped for air.

The ultimate goal for any writer, according to Wolfe, is 'the novel'. The dream is to retire to a shack in the mountains and spend six months writing your revolutionary novel which would enable you to leave your eternal mark in the literary world. Many of these hopefuls would reach the age of 40 and realise that their time had been and gone. In the literary world the novel is, as wold be said in Nietzschian term, the Ubermensch or the superior form of literary.

Wolfe's first experience of what is now called New Journalism was found in a copy of Esquire and was titled 'Joe Louis: the king as a middle aged man'. It carried the tone of a short story, much like the literary tone of a novel. This writer, Gay Talese (a former reporter for The Times) had reported on the little things, such as personal interaction and things that to the normal journalist would seem irrelevant, and this style was a far cry from the 'who, what, when, where' format us journalists are instilled with. Many journalists and intellectuals responded to this unfamiliar format of reporting as "he must have made it up!".

Soon enough other had caught on to this idea that a features writer could indeed leave the office and venture out to do his own reporting. arriving at the events early to note novelistic details such as jewelry worn by the subjects, or their perspiration or even the smell in the air. This is certainly what Wolfe's coworker Breslin did, to much resentment from the rest of the Journalistic world. This new type of Journalism was viewed as a cheap imitation, and people who participated were seen as cheats of 'the novel' dream.

Wolfe first realised that there mat be something 'new' in journalism when he accidentally made his entry into the arena in 1963 . What interested him was the possibility of using traditional literary devices such as dialogue or the stream-of-consciousness, whilst simultaneously producing an accurate piece of non-fiction.

One of the criticisms put towards new journalism is that it's non-critical. It merely provides entertainment for the reader as pointed out to Wolfe by a fellow panelist, Pauline Kael. However, on the other hand, are we then to assume that serious literature such as hard new has a duty to give moral instruction? Surely it is the job of a journalist to remain impartial and provide all the facts so that the reader can make their own judgement.