The New Journalism

At the beginning of the 1960s a new literary form took shape. Reporters, editors, and novelists experimented with a broadened palette of work methods that dispensed with the rigid formality of conventional reportage. The genre came to be called “The New Journalism,” and throughout the decade and well into the next one, bold determination to break new ground established the careers of writers whose names became synonymous with The New Journalism.

Influenced by Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Sinclair Lewis, James Joyce, and Jack Kerouac, the restless writers of the 1960s wanted to shake up the reading public. Their training ground had been the novel and short story; traditional journalism was more restrictive than they could stand. They began trying out strange admixtures of factual news writing and highly unconventional ways of working, generating magazine articles, newspaper stories, and short novels with text that could explode off the page with a power, electricity, and audacity previously unknown.

A prime example of the new modality was Tom Wolfe's 1963 Esquire magazine article "The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby," which employed freely constructed onomatopoeia and exaggerated punctuation to convey the roar and thrill of hot rod racing.

Wolfe has long been regarded as a key progenitor of The New Journalism, and indeed was among the first reporters to write in the literary journalistic style that largely ignored time-honored ways of reporting on American cultural life. Wolfe and his contemporaries in the sizzling sixties had no inhibitions about rule-breaking or convention-flouting in an era decade that saw challenges to almost all aspects of life: the civil rights movement and the energies it generated, the student-led uprisings against the Vietnam war, and unfamiliar artistic forms and fashions. The need was plain: a new vehicle of language was required to convey the excitement, exuberance, violence, dread and sheer energy that fueled a rapidly changing America.

The result of these efforts far outside of traditional newspaper or magazine undertakings was red-hot prose that grabbed the reader by the lapels with stories that were always surprising and frequently shocking.

electricity, and audacity previously unknown.

The late Hunter S. Thompson embodied the new ethos. Originally a sports writer, he traveled the western hemisphere for material for articles that paid only a pittance but built a name and brand for himself. When he left the U.S. Air Force, he asked for and received a letter of reference from his commanding officer, which went something like: “Airman Thompson has been nothing but trouble since he arrived on this base. He has been detrimental to morale, was known to damage vending machines and other property, and was generally anything but a model airman. We are not sorry to see him go. However, I believe I should add: If you are looking for a sports writer who will astound and astonish readers of your publication with his overpowering humor, peculiar, engaging, and fascinating style, and with his crazed wit and reporting techniques—Thompson is your man.”

Before Thompson burst onto the scene with the 1967 publication of Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs—he lived and rode with them for a time—he had developed the core technique essential to The New Journalism: immerse yourself into the story and become a central character in the narration. Hell's Angels was a critical success and effectively launched his career as an “outlaw” journalist. Someone, somewhere, referred to his style of reporting and writing as “Gonzo,”a phrase that became synonymous with his unmistakable, outrageous style. Many aspiring young writers and reporters continue to try their hand at imitating Gonzo journalism, with varying degrees of success. Matt Taibbi, late of Rolling Stone and currently editor-publisher of Racket News, is a notable example.

Conventions and proprieties that supported the rule of keeping a detached, neutral viewpoint (“The view from nowhere,” as Jay Rosen put it) were, for the New Journalists, brittle formalities. They could be discarded if not suited to the mission. Breaking rules became their stock-in-trade, but management was slow to accept this brash approach. Editors receiving copy from the field that violated the canons of writing were saying, in effect, I don’t know what this is, or what it’s attempting to accomplish, but it will never run in our newspaper.

Some editors were blatantly offended by these untested, unproven formulae. But the political and social movements irrevocably underway in the ‘60s, littered with flash-points of violence and near-anarchy, softened their resistance. Maybe these radical writers had something after all. Taking Authority’s word for it, about Vietnam, student demonstrations, political insurgencies, was no longer viable. The violence shook everyone up. A turning point in the acceptance of The New Journalism by the old guard was the Democratic Convention in Chicago in the summer of 1968, a protest and confrontation that exceeded the scale of previous street protests. The unnecessary brutality of the police, evident through all the print and broadcast reportage, and described later in a government inquiry as “a police riot,” was captured by the New Journalists with an immediacy unmatched by detached formal writing. The New Journalism had broken through.

In an interview about this new art-and-animosity form, Wolfe described it with elegant simplicity: “New Journalism” is using all the techniques available to the novelist in news writing and reporting.”

Gay Talese, who also began as a newspaper reporter, went on to practice The New Journalism, or Literary Journalism, as some called it, and his years-long reporting expeditions resulted in true-to-life “novels” that could be called ‘New Novels,’ turning New Journalism around, from reporting and writing that drew upon the tools and techniques of the novelist, as Wolfe (who had named the often raucous literary genre) described it, to novels that relied upon on the skills of the reporter.

Talese’s 1966 Esquire profile, “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” is recognized a defining document of New Journalism, and one of magazine greatest pieces of its era. Baseball players cannot play without bats; basketball players cannot play without a court and hoops; and Frank Sinatra could not sing if suffering from a cold. While Talese did not get an interview with “Ol’ Blue Eyes,” he interviewed countless acquaintances, and created an indelible portrait of his subject. He showed a world where something as simple as a cold had impact on Sinatra’s ability, confidence ("Picasso without paint, Ferrari without fuel—only worse"), and those who depended on him. 

Talese said in interview that he did not believe himself to be a ‘New Journalist’, and did not care to espouse that label, saying it was neither new nor journalism. But, he cannot get off so easily. His 1971 book, “Honor Thy Father,” was about the infamous Bonanno crime family of New York City. In his research, he rubbed shoulders with a variety of mafia gunmen, who carried pistols at all times and were devout in their loyalty to the family and its godfather, Joseph “Joe Bananas” Bonanno. He wrote about this “family” in a realistic manner devoid of the cartoonish pulp caricatures then prevalent. For his study of changing sexual mores in the 1970s, “Thy Neighbor’s Wife, Talese decided to take up residence for months in a ‘swingers’ club where total nudity was the rule for men and women. Years later, his wife of more than 60 years, Nan Ahearn Talese, was asked what she thought about her husband’s research for the story. She smiled, shrugged her shoulders, and said: “That’s journalism!”

Joan Didion wrote essays, novels and screenplays, often centered on her native California. Slight of frame, she evoked a certain ‘60s elegance and cool—famously pictured beside her Corvette in the drive of her Malibu home with cigarette in hand. Her work often touched on the dark underbelly of California, as she perceived it: crime, environmental degradation, and the counterculture movement, of which she was skeptical. When she wrote about personalities and profiles, she spared no one: “Writers are always selling someone out,” she said. Best known for her essay collections on American culture, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” and “The White Album,” and for her non-fiction book “The Year of Magical Thinking,” about the death of her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne.

Gloria Emerson was a native New Yorker who freelanced for major Americna magazines and papers. She reported from Saigon, where she lived for a time, and was a correspondent in London and Paris in the mid-1960s and 1970s. She became known in part because of an interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono about their effect on the antiwar effort. Emerson said she thought the Beatles and John Lennon “could have stopped the war” if they had performed for U.S. troops in Vietnam. She is remembered as one of the most important war correspondents of her era.

Eve Babitz was a Los Angeles-based writer and visual artist best known for her memoirs and her involvement in the cultural life of Los Angeles. Her work appeared in counterculture magazines as well as Esquire and Cosmopolitan. She was the author of several books about her life and times in Los Angeles. Her literary output drew comparisons to Joan Didion, and was highly regarded in art and literary circles. Her books include “Eve’s Hollywood,” “L.A. Woman,” “Black Swans,” and “Sex and Rage.”

Casting a look back to the New Journalism of an earlier era, Nellie Bly was among the cohort of reporters, circa 1890, who defied convention, especially regarding women; they went where they should not go. Nellie, real name Elizabeth Cochrane Seaman, went undercover as a patient to investigate the scandalous state of mental hospitals, resulting in a celebrated expose called “Ten Days in a Madhouse.” Another famous series resulted from her successful transit of the globe, à la Phileas Fogg, for the series “Around the World in 72 Days.” She also promoted the cause of women’s rights and professional opportunities, after learning the hard way that New York newspapers would not hire a woman. According to biographer, Brooke Kroeger, "Her two-part series in October 1887 (“Ten Days”) was a sensation, effectively launching the decade of stunt or detective reporting, a clear precursor to investigative journalism and one of Joseph Pulitzer's innovations that helped give the New Journalism of the 1880s and 1890s its moniker."

Objective journalism?

On the way the New Journalists often placed themselves at the center of their stories, Thompson wrote: “So much for Objective Journalism. Don't bother to look for it here — not under any byline of mine; or anyone else I can think of. With the possible exception of things like box scores, race results, and stock market tabulations, there is no such thing as Objective Journalism.”

Other noted practitioners of The New Journalism:

Terry Southern, George Plimpton, Seymour Krim, Oriana Fallaci, Truman Capote, Michael Herr, Barbara Goldsmith, Joe McGinnis, Garry Wills.

Next— Part II: First-person from the center of the storm