Tom Wolfe and The New Journalism

Tom Wolfe’s New Journalism deals with what made the new style of journalism so absorbing and gripping. Social realism is incredibly important to the new journalists and it was said that the most important literature being written in America at the time of the movement was non-fiction. There are a few specific devices that new journalism uses and below are notes from the chapters in which they are discussed.

1. The Feature Game

- a humorous, detailed lead up to Wolfe’s work on the New York Herald Tribune
- in his opinion, reporters at the time lacked ambition
- journalism is a game –its all about getting the scoop and is rife with competition
- all journalists were working towards, what Wolfe calls, the final triumph – writing a novel
- Wolfe had very little respect for feature stories
- Portis, Breslin, Schaap, Mok and the “fat man” – Wolfe would do anything for a story
- The importance of the novel: a psychological phenomenon
- “By the 1950s The Novel had become a nationwide tournament” asserts Wolfe
- Portis lived ‘the dream’ – he wrote a novel, in a fishing shack in Arkansas

2. Like a Novel

- the increasing popularity of novel writing influenced traditional journalism – using conventions from a novel
- reporters started finding stories for themselves
- Wolfe had a dim view of local reporters, believing they ‘ran out of stories’ far too quickly
- Approaching journalism in the same way you would a novel; with imagination
- Writing with a different point-of-view – for example, beginning with narration
- Writing in a different dialect, known as chameleon writing, to attract a larger audience and simply make the writing more interesting
- Resulted in more intense, detailed and time consuming journalism that entered into the audience’s mind rather than merely stated facts
- Included an over-use of punctuation
- Tom Wolfe pioneered New Journalism, bringing it away from the novel’s stylistic writing

3. Seizing the Power

- The New Yorker affair – April 1965
- The Columbia Journalism Review and the New York Review of books
- June 1966, The personal voice and the impersonal eye – the literary world was starting to recognise non-fiction as an artistic form
- Works such as “M”, a book on the Vietnam way by a reporter and “Paper Lion” a piece on American football
- The 1960s – realism, scene-by-scene construction, full dialogue, third-person point of view and describing everyday things
- Truman Capote used third-person point of view, although Wolfe was highly critical of this technique