THE NEW JOURNALISM
Here's a comment on the co-called "New Journalism" by editor, writer
and publisher Michael Korda:
"After the New York Herald Tribune closed its doors in 1966, Clay
Felker, then the editor of the newspaper's Sunday magazine, reconstituted
New York as an independent enterprise and eventually made it a home for the
practitioners of what was then called 'the new journalism,' including Jimmy
Breslin, Tom Wolfe, Gail Sheehy, Nick Pileggi, and 'Adam Smith.' The new
journalism was hard to define, but in practice it meant writing nonfiction
as narrative, with a clear-cut story line, strong characters, and as much
pizzazz as possible. In the 'old' journalism, typified by the newspages of
The New York Times, the writer was ideally invisible -- he or she reported
the facts as objectively as possible. In the 'new' journalism, the writer
bullied his way into the story, sometimes overwhelming the people he was
writing about, inevitably blurred what had once been the fairly rigid
distinction between nonfiction and fiction -- a distinction that had in any
event been eroding under the influence of books such as Meyer Levin's
Compulsion (which presented fact as fiction) and the nonfiction of Norman
Mailer (in which fact and fiction were indistinguishable). In keeping with
the zeitgeist, the new journalism was almost by definition overheated, full
of sound effects, and occasionally shrill. The people who were good at it,
such as Wolfe and Breslin, were journalistic exhibitionists, media stars
whose specialty was making even the humdrum and the insignificant seem
important and, above all, exciting. Even the restaurant reviews had to be
written like narrative stories, with a beginning, a middle, and an end,
which probably explains why the celebrity chef appeared as a culture figure
then, since a writer could hang a story on him, as opposed to simply
reporting whether the food was edible and the service good or bad."