New Journalism was a style of 1960s and 1970s news writing and journalism which used literary techniques deemed unconventional at the time. The term was codified with its current meaning by Tom Wolfe in a 1973 collection of journalism articles he published as The New Journalism, which included works by himself, Truman Capote, Hunter S. Thompson, Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, Robert Christgau, and others.

Articles in the New Journalism style tended not to be found in newspapers, but rather in magazines such as The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, CoEvolution Quarterly, Esquire, New York, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, and for a short while in the early 1970s, Scanlan's Monthly.

History[link]

Gay Talese, in 2006, at the Strand Bookstore in New York City.

Various trends and tendencies throughout the history of American Journalism have been labeled "new journalism." Robert E. Park, for instance, in his Natural History of the Newspaper, referred to the advent of the penny press in the 1830s as "new journalism."^[1] Likewise, the appearance of the yellow press, papers such as Joseph Pulitzer's New York World in the 1880s, led journalists and historians to proclaim that a "New Journalism" had been created. Ault and Emery, for instance, said "Industrialization and urbanization changed the face of America during the latter half of the Nineteenth century, and its newspapers entered an era known as that of the 'New Journalism.'"^[2] In 1960, John Hohenberg, in The Professional Journalist, called the interpretive reporting which developed after World War II a "new journalism which not only seeks to explain as well as to inform; it even dares to teach, to measure, to evaluate."^[3]

During the sixties and seventies, the term enjoyed widespread popularity, often with meanings bearing manifestly little or no connection with one another. Although James E. Murphy noted that "...most uses of the term seem to refer to something more specific than vague new directions in journalism",^[4] Curtis D. MacDougal devoted the Preface of the Sixth Edition of his Interpretative Reporting to New Journalism and cataloged many of the contemporary definitions: "Activist, advocacy, participatory, tell-it-as-you-see-it, sensitivity, investigative, saturation, humanistic, reformist and a few more."^[5]

The Magic Writing Machine—Student Probes of the New Journalism, a collection edited and introduced by Everette E. Dennis, came up with six categories, labelled new nonfiction (reportage), alternative journalism ("modern muckraking"), advocacy journalism, underground journalism and precision journalism.^[6] Michael Johnson's The New Journalism addresses itself to three phenomena: the underground press, the artists of nonfiction, and changes in the established media.^[7]

Journalists recognized as using the style include Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, Truman Capote, P. J. O'Rourke, George Plimpton, Terry Southern, and Gay Talese. Hunter S. Thompson was a major practitioner of new journalism and gonzo journalism, his own particular style. Thompson's first book, Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs, is a more conventional piece, and shows the beginnings of a more memoir-based approach to reportage. Gay Talese's 1966 article for Esquire, Frank Sinatra Has a Cold, was an influential piece of new journalism that gave a detailed portrait of Frank Sinatra without ever interviewing him.

Norman Mailer at the Miami Book Fair International of 1988

New journalism writers brought new approaches to areas already covered by the mainstream press. The psychedelic movement was something that many of the writers of the period covered, such as in Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. The Vietnam War was another common topic, as was the political turmoil on the homefront. Terry Southern's Grooving in Chi documented the 1968 Chicago National Democratic Convention for Esquire in new journalism manner. New journalism's techniques were also applied to less obvious subjects, such as financial markets (by George Goodman under the pseudonym Adam Smith, in essays originally published in New York magazine and later collected in a book called The Money Game.)

Some authors of conventional fiction switched to writing in the style of new journalism, such as Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, and Norman Mailer's Armies of the Night. However, neither author ever agreed to their style's comparison to Wolfe's school of narration, nor did many others who have been retrospectively promoted as being members and therein associated. Much to the contrary, many of these writers would deny that their work was generically relevant to other new journalists at the time.

Early development, the sixties[link]

How and when the term New Journalism began to refer to a genre has not been clear.^[8] Tom Wolfe, a practitioner and principal advocate of the form,^[8] wrote in at least two articles^[9][10] in 1972 that he had no idea of where it began. Trying to shed light on the matter, literary critic Seymour Krim, offered his explanation in 1973.

"I'm certain that [Pete] Hamill first used the expression. In about April of 1965 he called me at Nugget Magazine, where I was editorial director, and told me he wanted to write an article about new New Journalism. It was to be about the exciting things being done in the old reporting genre by Talese, Wolfe and Breslin. He never wrote the piece, so far as I know, but I began using the expression in conversation and writing. It was picked up and stuck."^[11]

But wherever and whenever the term arose, there is evidence of some literary experimentation in the early 1960s, as when Norman Mailer broke away from fiction to write Superman Comes to the Supermarket.^[12] A report of John F. Kennedy's nomination that year, the piece established a precedent which Mailer would later build on in his 1968 convention coverage (Miami and the Siege of Chicago) and in other nonfiction as well.

Wolfe wrote that his first acquaintance with a new style of reporting came in a 1962 Esquire article about Joe Louis by Gay Talese. "'Joe Louis at Fifty'^a wasn't like a magazine article at all. It was like a short story. It began with a scene, an intimate confrontation between Louis and his third wife..."^[13] Wolfe said Talese was the first to apply fiction techniques to reporting.

Esquire claimed credit as the seedbed for these new techniques. Esquire editor Harold Hayes later wrote that "in the Sixties, events seemed to move too swiftly to allow the osmotic process of art to keep abreast, and when we found a good novelist we immediately sought to seduce him with the sweet mysteries of current events."^[14] Soon others, notably New York, followed Esquire's lead, and the style eventually infected other magazines and then books.^[15]

The seventies[link]

Much of the criticism favorable to this New Journalism came from the writers themselves. Talese and Wolfe, in a panel discussion cited earlier, asserted that, although what they wrote may look like fiction, it was indeed reporting: "Fact reporting, leg work." Talese called it.^[16]

Wolfe, in Esquire for December, 1972, hailed the replacement of the novel by the New Journalism as literature's "main event"^[17] and detailed the points of similarity and contrast between the New Journalism and the novel. The four techniques of realism that he and the other New Journalists employed, he wrote, had been the sole province of novelists and other literati. They are scene-by-scene construction, full record of dialogue, third-person point of view and the manifold incidental details to round out character (i.e., descriptive incidentals).^[18] The result:

... is a form that is not merely like a novel. It consumes devices that happen to have originated with the novel and mixes them with every other device known to prose. And all the while, quite beyond matters of technique, it enjoys an advantage so obvious, so built-in, one almost forgets what power it has': the simple fact that the reader knows all this actually happened. The disclaimers have been erased. The screen is gone. The writer is one step closer to the absolute involvement of the reader that Henry James and James Joyce dreamed of but never achieved.^[19]

The essential difference between the new nonfiction and conventional reporting is, he said, that the basic unit of reporting was no longer the datum or piece of information but the scene. Scene is what underlies "the sophisticated strategies of prose."^[20]

Truman Capote, as photographed by Roger Higgins in 1959.

The first of the new breed of nonfiction writers to receive wide notoriety was Truman Capote,^[21] whose 1965 best-seller, In Cold Blood, was a detailed narrative of the murder of a Kansas farm family. Capote culled material from some 6,000 pages of notes.^[21] The book brought its author instant celebrity.^[22] Capote announced that he had created a new art form which he labelled the "nonfiction novel."^[21]

I've always had the theory that reportage is the great unexplored art form... I've had this theory that a factual piece of work could explore whole new dimensions in writing that would have a double effect fiction does not have—the every fact of its being true, every word of its true, would add a double contribution of strength and impact^[23]

Capote continued to stress that he was a literary artist, not a journalist, but critics hailed the book as a classic example of New Journalism.^[21]

Wolfe's The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, whose introduction and title story, according to James E. Murphy, "emerged as a manifest of sorts for the nonfiction genre,"^[21] was published the same year. In his introduction,^[24] Wolfe wrote that he encountered trouble fashioning an Esquire article out of material on a custom car extravaganza in Los Angeles, in 1963. Finding he could not do justice to the subject in magazine article format, he wrote a letter to his editor, Byron Dobell, which grew into a 49-page report^b detailing the custom car world, complete with scene construction, dialogue and flamboyant description. Esquire ran the letter, striking out "Dear Byron." and it became Wolfe's maiden effort as a New Journalist.^[21]

In an article entitled "The Personal Voice and the Impersonal Eye", Dan Wakefield acclaimed the nonfiction of Capote and Wolfe as elevating reporting to the level of literature, terming that work and some of Norman Mailer's nonfiction a journalistic breakthrough: reporting "charged with the energy of art".^[25]

A review by Jack Newfield of Dick Schaap's Turned On saw the book as a good example of budding tradition in American journalism which rejected many of the constraints of conventional reporting:

This new genre defines itself by claiming many of the techniques that were once the unchallenged terrain of the novelist: tension, symbol, cadence, irony, prosody, imagination.^[26]

A 1968 review of Wolfe's The Pump House Gang and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test said Wolfe and Mailer were applying "the imaginative resources of fiction"^[27] to the world around them and termed such creative journalism "hystory" to connote their involvement in what they reported. Talese in 1970, in his Author's Note to Fame and Obscurity, a collection of his pieces from the 1960s, wrote:

The new journalism, though often reading like fiction, is not fiction. It is, or should be, as reliable as the most reliable reportage although it seeks a larger truth than is possible through the mere compilation of verifiable facts, the use of direct quotations, and adherence to the rigid organizational style of the older form.^[28]

Hunter S. Thompson at the Miami Book Fair International of 1988.

Seymour Krim's Shake It for the World, Smartass, which appeared in 1970, contained "An Open Letter to Norman Mailer"^[29] which defined New Journalism as "a free nonfictional prose that uses every resource of the best fiction."^[30] In "The Newspaper As Literature/Literature As Leadership",^[31] he called journalism the de facto literature of the majority,^[32] a synthesis of journalism and literature that the book's postscript called "journalit."^[33] In 1972, in "An Enemy of the Novel", Krim identified his own fictional roots and declared that the needs of the time compelled him to move beyond fiction to a more "direct" communication to which he promised to bring all of fiction's resources.^[34]

David McHam, in an article titled "The Authentic New Journalists", distinguished the nonfiction reportage of Capote, Wolfe and others from other, more generic interpretations of New Journalism.^[35] Also in 1971, William L. Rivers disparaged the former and embraced the latter, concluding, "In some hands, they add a flavor and a humanity to journalistic writing that push it into the realm of art."^[36]

Charles Brown in 1972 reviewed much that had been written as New Journalism and about New Journalism by Capote, Wolfe, Mailer and others and labelled the genre "New Art Journalism," which allowed him to test it both as art and as journalism. He concluded that the new literary form was useful only in the hands of literary artists of great talent.^[37]

In the first of two pieces by Wolfe in New York detailing the growth of the new nonfiction and its techniques, Wolfe returned to the fortuitous circumstances surrounding the construction of Kandy-Kolored and added:

Its virtue was precisely in showing me the possibility of there being something "new" in journalism. What interested me was not simply the discovery that it was possible to write accurate nonfiction with techniques usually associated with novels and short stories. It was that—plus. It was the discovery that it was possible in nonfiction, in journalism, to use any literary device, from the traditional dialogisms of the essay to stream-of-consciousness...

The eighties[link]

George Plimpton at the Miami Book Fair International, November 11, 1987

In the eighties, the use of New Journalism saw a decline, several of the old trailblazers still used fiction techniques in their nonfiction books.^[38] However, younger writers in Esquire and Rolling Stone, where the style had flourished in the two earlier decades, shifted away from the New Journalism. Fiction techniques had not been abandoned by these writers, but they were used sparingly and less flamboyantly.

"Whatever happened to the New Journalism?" wondered Thomas Powers in a 1975 issue of Commonweal. In 1981, Joe Nocera published a postmortem in the Washington Monthly blaming its demise on the journalistic liberties taken by Hunter S. Thompson. Regardless of the culprit, less than a decade after Tom Wolfe's 1973 New Journalism anthology, the consensus was that New Journalism was dead.^[39]

Characteristics[link]

As a literary genre, New Journalism has certain technical characteristics. It is an artistic, creative, literary reporting form with three basic traits: dramatic literary techniques; intensive reporting; and reporting of generally acknowledged subjectivity.^[40]

As subjective journalism[link]

Pervading many of the specific interpretations of New Journalism is a posture of subjectivity. Subjectivism is thus a common element among many (though not all) of its definitions.^[41] In contrast to a conventional journalistic striving for an objectivity, subjective journalism allows for the writer's opinion, ideas or involvement to creep into the story.

Much of the critical literature concerns itself with a strain of subjectivism which may be called activism in news reporting.^[41] In 1970, Gerald Grant wrote disparagingly in Columbia Journalism Review of a "New Journalism of passion and advocacy"^[42] and in the Saturday Review Hohenberg discussed "The Journalist As Missionary"^[43] For Masterson in 1971, "The New Journalism" provided a forum for discussion of journalistic and social activism. In another 1971 article under the same title, Ridgeway called the counter-culture magazines such as The New Republic and Ramparts and the American underground press New Journalism.

Another version of subjectivism in reporting is what is sometimes called participatory reporting. Robert Stein, in Media Power, defines New Journalism as "A form of participatory reporting that evolved in parallel with participatory politics..."^[44]

As form and technique[link]

The above interpretations of New Journalism view it as an attitude toward the practice of journalism. But a significant portion of the critical literature deals with form and technique.^[8] Critical comment dealing with New Journalism as a literary-journalistic genre (a distinct type of category of literary work grouped according to similar and technical characteristics^[45]) treats it as the new nonfiction. Its traits are extracted from the criticism written by those who claim to practice it and by others.^[8] Admittedly it is hard to isolate from a number of the more generic meanings.

The new nonfiction where sometimes taken for advocacy of subjective journalism.^[8] A 1972 article by Dennis Chase^[46] defines New Journalism as a subjective journalism emphasizing "truth" over "facts" but uses major nonfiction stylists as its example.

As intensive reportage[link]

Although much of the critical literature discussed the use of literary or fictional techniques as the basis for a New Journalism, critics also referred to the form as stemming from intensive reporting.^[47] Stein, for instance, found the key to New Journalism not its fictionlike form but the "saturation reporting" which precedes it, the result of the writer's immersion in his subject. Consequently, Stein concluded, the writer is as much part of his story as is the subject^[48] and he thus linked saturation reporting with subjectivity. For him, New Journalism is inconsistent with objectivity or accuracy.^[49]

However, others have argued that total immersion enhances accuracy. As Wolfe put the case:

I am the first to agree that the New Journalism should be as accurate as traditional journalism. In fact my claims for the New Journalism, and my demands upon it, go far beyond that. I contend that it has already proven itself more accurate than traditional journalism—which unfortunately is saying but so much...^[50]

Wolfe coined "saturation reporting" in his Bulletin of the American Society of Newspaper Editors article. After citing the opening paragraphs of Talese's Joe Louis piece, he confessed believing that Talese had "piped" or faked the story, only later to be convinced, after learning that Talese so deeply delved into the subject, that he could report entire scenes and dialogues.

The basic units of reporting are no longer who-what-when-where-how and why but whole scenes and stretches of dialogue. The New Journalism involves a depth of reporting and an attention to the most minute facts and details that most newspapermen, even the most experienced, have never dreamed of.^[13]

In his "Birth of the New Journalism" in New York, Wolfe returned to the subject, which he here described as a depth of information never before demanded in newspaper work. The New Journalist, he said, must stay with his subject for days and weeks at a stretch.^[9] In Wolfe's Esquire piece, saturation became the "Locker Room Genre" of intensive digging into the lives and personalities of one's subject, in contrast to the aloof and genteel tradition of the essayists and "The Literary Gentlemen in the Grandstand."^[10]

For Talese, intensive reportage took the form of interior monologue to discover from his subjects what they were thinking, not, he said in a panel discussion reported in Writer's Digest, merely reporting what people did and said.^[16]

Wolfe identified the four main devices New Journalists borrowed from literary fiction:^[51]

• Telling the story using scenes rather than historical narrative as much as possible
• Dialogue in full (Conversational speech rather than quotations and statements)
• Point-of-view (present every scene through the eyes of a particular character)
• Recording everyday details such as behavior, possessions, friends and family (which indicate the "status life" of the character)

Despite these elements, New Journalism is not fiction. It maintains elements of reporting including strict adherence to factual accuracy and the writer being the primary source. To get "inside the head" of a character, the journalist asks the subject what they were thinking or how they felt.

Practitioners[link]

Writers[link]

It's hard to say definitively which writers are New Journalists. In The New Journalism: A Critical Perspective Murphy writes, "A a literary genre, New Journalism [...] involves a more or less honk defined group of writers [...]. Each is stylistically unique, but all sharing common formal elements."^[40] Among the most prominent writers of New Journalism, Murphy lists: Jimmy Breslin, Truman Capote, Joan Didion, David Halberstam, Pete Hamill, Larry King, Norman Mailer, Joe McGinniss, Rex Reed, Mike Royko, John Sack, Dick Schaap, Terry Southern, Gail Sheehy, Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson, Dan Wakefield, and Tom Wolfe.^[40] In The New Journalism, Johnson and Wolfe, also includes George Plimpton for his Paper Lion, Life writer James Mills, Robert Christgau and a few others. Christgau, however, stated in an 2001 interview that he did not see himself as a New Journalist.^[52]

Editors[link]

The editors Clay Felker, Normand Poirier, and Harold Hayes also contributed to the rise of New Journalism.

Criticism[link]

While many praised the New Journalist's style of writing, Wolfe et al., also received severe criticism from contemporary journalists and writers. Essentially two different charges were leveled against New Journalism: criticism against it as a distinct genre and criticism against it as a new form.^[53][54]

Robert Stein believed that "In the New Journalism the eye of the beholder is all—or almost all,"^[55] and in 1971 Philip M. Howard, wrote that the new nonfiction writers rejected objectivity in favor of a more personal, subjective reportage.^[56] This parallels much of what Wakefield said in his 1966 Atlantic article.

The important and interesting and hopeful trend to me in the new journalism is its personal nature—not in the sense of personal attacks, but in the presence of the reporter himself and the significance of his own involvement. This is sometimes felt to be egotistical, and the frank identification of the author, especially as the "I" instead of merely the impersonal "eye" is often frowned upon and taken as proof of "subjectivity," which is the opposite of the usual journalistic pretense.^[25]

And in spite of the fact that Capote believed in the objective accuracy of In Cold Blood and strove to keep himself totally out of the narrative, one reviewer found in the book the "tendency among writers to resort to subjective sociology, on the other hand, or to super-creative reportage, on the other."^[57] Charles Self^[58] termed this characteristic of New Journalism as "admitted" subjectivity, whether first-person or third-person, and acknowledged the subjectivity inherent in his account.

Lester Markel polemically criticized New Journalism in the Bulletin of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, he rejected the claim to greater in-depth reporting and labelled the writers "factual fictionists" and "deep-see reporters."^[59] He feared they were performing as sociologists and psychoanalysts rather than as journalists.

More reasoned, though still essentially negative, Arlen in his 1972 "Notes on the New Journalism," put the New Journalism into a larger socio-historical perspective by tracing the techniques from earlier writers and from the constraints and opportunities of the current age. But much of the more routine New Journalism "consists in exercises by writer . . . in gripping and controlling and confronting a subject within the journalist's own temperament. Presumably," he wrote, "this is the 'novelistic technique.'"^[60] However, he conceded that the best of this work had "considerably expanded the possibilities of journalism."^[60]

Much negative criticism of New Journalism were directed at individual writers.^[61] For example, Cynthia Ozick asserted in The New Republic, that Capote in In Cold Blood was doing little more than trying to devise a form: "One more esthetic manipulation."^[62] Sheed offered, in "A Fun-House Mirror," a witty refutation of Wolfe's claim that he takes on the expression and the guise of whomever he is writing about. "The Truman Capotes may hold up a tolerably clear glass to nature," he wrote, "but Wolfe holds up a fun-house mirror, and I for one don't give a hoot whether he calls the reflection fact or fiction."^[63]

[edit] "Parajournalism" and the New Yorker affair

Among the hostile critics of the New Journalism were Dwight MacDonald,^[64] whose most vocal criticism compromised a chapter in what became known as "the New Yorker affair" of 1965. Wolfe had written a two-part semi-fictional parody in New York^[65] of The New Yorker and its editor, William Shawn. Reaction notably from New Yorker writers, was loud and prolonged,^[66]c but the most significant reaction came from MacDonald, who counterattacked in two articles in the New York Review of Books.^[67][68] In the first, MacDonald termed Wolfe's approach "parajournalism" and applied it to all similar styles. "Parajournalism," MacDonald wrote,

... seems to be journalism—"the collection and dissemination of current news"—but the appearance is deceptive. It is a bastard form, having it both ways, exploiting the factual authority of journalism and the atmospheric license of fiction.^[67]

The New Yorker parody, he added, "... revealed the ugly side of Parajournalism when it tries to be serious."^[67]

In his second article, MacDonald addressed himself to the accuracy of Wolfe's report. He charged that Wolfe "takes a middle course, shifting gears between fact and fantasy, spoof and reportage, until nobody knows which end is, at the moment, up".^[68] New Yorker writers Renata Adler and Gerald Jonas joined the fray in the Winter 1966 issue of Columbia Journalism Review.^[69]

Wolfe himself returned to the affair a full seven years later, devoting the second of his two February New York articles^[70] (1972) to his detractors but not to dispute their attack on his factual accuracy. He argued that most of the contentions arose because for traditional literati nonfiction should not succeed—which his nonfiction obviously had.^[70]

Gail Sheehy and "Redpants"[link]

In The New Journalism: A Critical Perspective, Murphy writes, "Partly because Wolfe took liberties with the facts in his New Yorker parody, New Journalism began to get a reputation for juggling the facts in the search for truth, fictionalizing some details to get a larger 'reality.'"^[71] Widely criticized was the technique of the composite character,^[71] the most notorious example of which was "Redpants," a presumed prostitute whom Gail Sheehy wrote about in New York in a series on that city's sexual subculture. When it later became known that the character was distilled from a number of prostitutes, there was an outcry against Sheehy's method and, by extension, to the credibility of all of New Journalism.^[71] In the Wall Street Journal, one critic wrote:

It's all part of the New Journalism, or the Now Journalism, and it's practiced widely these days. Some editors and reporters vigorously defend it. Others just as vigorously attack it. No one has polled the reader, but whether he approves or disapproves, it's getting harder and harder for him to know what he can believe.^[72]

Newsweek reported that critics felt Sheehy's energies were better suited to fiction than fact.^[73] John Tebbel, in an article in Saturday Review,^[74] although treating New Journalism in its more generic sense as new a trend, chided it for the fictional technique of narrative leads which the new nonfiction writers had introduced into journalism and deplored its use in newspapers.

[edit] Criticism against New Journalism as a distinct genre

Newfield, in 1972, changed his attitude since his earlier, 1967,^[26] review of Wolfe. "New Journalism does not exist," the later article titled "Is there a 'new journalism'?"^[75] says. "It is a false category. There is only good writing and bad writing, smart ideas and dumb ideas, hard work and laziness."^[75] While the practice of journalism had improved during the past fifteen years, he argued, it was because of an influx of good writers notable for unique styles, not because they belonged to any school or movement.^[75]

Jimmy Breslin, who is often labelled a New Journalist, took the same view: "Believe me, there is no new journalism. It is a gimmick to say there is . . . Story telling is older than the alphabet and that is what it is all about."^[76]

See also[link]

Journalism portal

• Creative nonfiction
• Gonzo Journalism
• New Games Journalism
• The New Journalism
• Nonfiction novel
• Reportage

References and Notes[link]

Notes

Bibliography

Further reading[link]

• Flippen, Charles C. (1974). Liberating the Media: The New Journalism. Acropolis Books. ISBN 0-87491-362-4. 
• Hollowell, John (1977). Fact & Fiction: The New Journalism and the Nonfiction Novel. University of North Carolina Press. ISBN 0-8078-1281-1. 
• Johnson, E. W.; Wolfe, Tom (1973). The New Journalism. Harper & Row. ISBN 0-06-014707-5. 
• Mills, Nicolaus (1974). The New Journalism: A Historical Anthology. McGraw-Hill. ISBN 0-07-042350-4. 
• Polsgrove, Carol (1995). It Wasn't Pretty, Folks, But Didn't We Have Fun?: Surviving the '60s with Esquire's Harold Hayes. W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 1-57143-091-1. 
• Weber, Ronald (1974). The Reporter as Artist: A Look at the New Journalism Controversy. Hastings House. ISBN 0-8038-6330-6. 
• Weingarten, Marc (2006). The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, and the New Journalism Revolution. Crown Publishers. ISBN 1-4000-4914-8. 
• Of honest men & good writers Jack Newfield making the case against New Journalism as a distinct genre in a Village Voice article published May 18, 1972

External links[link]

• "The 7 Greatest Stories in the History of Esquire Magazine". Esquire (Hearst Corporation). November 30, 2009. http://www.esquire.com/features/page-75/greatest-stories. Retrieved December 31, 2009. 

• Biographical dictionary of 24,000+ British and Irish journalists who died between 1800 and 1960.

Gay Talese
Gay Talese
Born	(1932-02-07) February 7, 1932 (age 80) United States
Occupation	Writer
Spouse	Nan Talese

Gay Talese (born February 7, 1932) is an American author. As a writer for The New York Times and Esquire in the 1960s, he helped to define literary journalism. His most famous articles are about Joe DiMaggio and Frank Sinatra.^{[1][2][3][4][5]}

Talese is a visiting writer at the Master of Professional Writing Program at the University of Southern California each spring.

Biography[link]

Wikinews has related news: Gay Talese on the state of journalism, Iraq and his life

Nan Talese and Gay Talese at the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival.

Gay Talese was born into a Roman Catholic Italian-American family in Ocean City, New Jersey, located just south of Atlantic City. His southern Italian father, Joseph Talese, was a tailor who had migrated to the United States from Maida, a town in the province of Catanzaro in 1922 and his mother, the former Catherine DePaolo, was a buyer for a Brooklyn department store (he is sometimes erroneously identified as being from Brooklyn).

At school as a child, he wore hand crafted suits from his father's shop which, he later reflected in his memoir Origins of a Nonfiction Writer (1996), caused him to appear to be older than his classmates. He recounted his early years in his book Unto the Sons.

Talese graduated from Ocean City High School in 1949.^[6]

Talese is married to another writer, Nan Talese, a New York editor who runs the Nan A. Talese/Doubleday imprint. Gay and Nan Talese's marriage will be the subject of Talese's next book, the third in a series published by Knopf.^[7] The first two books, Unto the Sons and A Writer's Life, were published in 1992 and 2006, respectively.

Talese remains active in the Italian American community, including the National Italian American Foundation, which hosted a writer's series in his name. He has been an outspoken advocate for more Italian Americans to pursue careers in writing and editing.

Origins of a writer[link]

His entry into writing was entirely happenstance and the unintended consequence of the then high school sophomore's attempt to gain more playing time on the baseball team. The assistant coach had the duty of calling in the chronicle of each game to the local newspaper and when he complained he was too busy to take care of it, the head coach turned to Talese to take over the duties. As he recalls in Origins,

"On the mistaken assumption that relieving the athletic department of its press duties would gain me the gratitude of the coach and get me more playing time, I took the job and even embellished it by using my typing skills to compose my own account of the games rather than merely relaying the information to the newspapers by telephone."

Talese was soon (after only seven sports articles) given the job of covering not only the goings-on at the school, but also given his own column for the weekly Ocean City Sentinel-Ledger. By the time he left for college in September 1949, Talese had written some 311 stories and columns for the Sentinel-Ledger.

Talese credits his mother as the role model he followed in developing the interviewing techniques that would serve him so well later in life interviewing such varied subjects as mafia members and middle-class Americans on their sexual habits. He relates in A Writer's Life:

"I learned [from my mother] ... to listen with patience and care, and never to interrupt even when people were having great difficulty in explaining themselves, for during such halting and imprecise moments ... people are very revealing—what they hesitate to talk about can tell much about them. Their pauses, their evasions, their sudden shifts in subject matter are likely indicators of what embarrasses them, or irritates them, or what they regard as too private or imprudent to be disclosed to another person at that particular time. However, I have also overheard many people discussing candidly with my mother what they had earlier avoided—a reaction that I think had less to do with her inquiring nature or sensitively posed questions than with their gradual acceptance of her as a trustworthy individual in whom they could confide."

College[link]

Talese at home in 2007

Talese was rejected by dozens of colleges in New Jersey and nearby states. He eventually was accepted at the University of Alabama, where his selection of a major was, as he described it, a moot choice. "I chose journalism as my college major because that is what I knew," he recalls, "but I really became a student of history."

It was here that he would begin to employ literary devices more well known in fiction, like establishing the "scene" with minute details and beginning articles in medias res (Latin for "in the midst of things"). In his junior year, he became the sports editor for the campus newspaper, Crimson-White, and started a column he dubbed "Sports Gay-zing", for which he wrote on November 7, 1951):

Rhythmic "Sixty Minute Man" emanated from the Supe Store juke box and Larry (The Maestro) Chiodetti beat against the table like mad in keeping time with the jumpy tempo. T-shirted Bobby Marlow was just leaving the Sunday morning bull session and dapper Bill Kilroy had just purchased the morning newspapers.

This was before Lillian Ross did the same in Picture (1952) or Truman Capote used the technique in The Muses are Heard (1956). More importantly, Talese included among his subjects both the "losers" and the unnoticed. He was more interested in those who did not attain the glory of winning and less so in hero-worshipping the winners.

Professional career[link]

Newspaper reporter[link]

After graduating in June 1953, he moved to New York City yet could only find work as a copyboy. The job was, however, at the esteemed New York Times and he showed up for his mundane position nevertheless in handstitched Italian suits. He was eventually able to get an article published in the Times, albeit unsigned (without credit). In "Times Square Anniversary" (November 2, 1953), he interviewed the man who was responsible for running the headlines that flash across the famous marquee above Times Square.

He followed this with an article in the February 21, 1954 edition concerning the chairs used on the boardwalk of Atlantic City (something with which he was familiar as his home town of Ocean City is the next hamlet south of the gambling mecca). Yet, his budding journalism career would have to be put on hold – Talese was drafted into the United States Army in 1954.

While at the University of Alabama, he had been required (as were all male students at the time owing to the Korean War) to join the Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC) and had moved to New York awaiting his eventual commission as a second lieutenant. He was sent to Fort Knox, Kentucky, to train in the Tank Corps. Finding his mechanical skills lacking, he was transferred to the Office of Public Information where he once again worked for a local paper, Inside the Turret, and soon had his own column, "Fort Knox Confidential."

Having kept in touch with his former employers at the Times, when Talese completed his military obligation in 1956 he returned to New York as a full-fledged sports reporter. He later opined, "Sports is about people who lose and lose and lose. They lose games; then they lose their jobs. It can be very intriguing." Of the various fields, boxing held the most appeal for Talese, largely because it was about individuals engaged in contests and those individuals in the mid to late 1950s were becoming predominately non-white at the prizefight level. He wrote 38 articles about Floyd Patterson alone.

For this, he was rewarded with a promotion to the Albany Bureau to cover state politics. It was a short-lived assignment, however, as Talese's exacting habits and meticulous style soon irritated his new editors to the point that they recalled him to the city, assigning him to write minor obituaries. He puts it, "I was banished to the obituary desk as punishment — to break me. There were major obituaries and minor obituaries. I was sent to write minor obituaries not even seven paragraphs long." After a year in the Times obituary section, he began to write articles for the Sunday Times which was run as a separate organization from the daily Times by editor Lester Markel.

Magazine reporter[link]

Talese's first piece in Esquire appeared in a special New York issue July 1960 -- a series of scenes in the city.^[9] When the Times newspaper unions struck the paper in December 1962, Talese had plenty of time to watch rehearsals for a production by Broadway director Joshua Logan for an Esquire profile. As Carol Polsgrove points out in her history of Esquire in the Sixties, it was the kind of reporting he liked to do best: "just being there, observing, waiting for the climactic moment when the mask would drop and true character would reveal itself."^[10]

In 1964, Talese published The Bridge (1964), a reporter-style, non-fiction depiction of the construction of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge in New York City. In 1965, he left the New York Times to write full time for editor Harold Hayes at Esquire. His 1966 Esquire article on Frank Sinatra, "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold," is one of the most influential American magazine articles of all time, and a pioneering example of New Journalism and creative nonfiction. With what some have called a brilliant structure and pacing, the article focused not just on Sinatra himself, but also on Talese's pursuit of his subject.

Talese's celebrated Esquire piece about Joe DiMaggio, The Silent Season of a Hero-- in part a meditation on the transient nature of fame -- also appeared in 1966. When a number of Esquire pieces were collected into a book called Fame and Obscurity Talese paid tribute in its introduction to two writers he admired by citing "an aspiration on my part to somehow bring to reportage the tone that Irwin Shaw and John O'Hara had brought to the short story." Honor Thy Father (1971) was made into a feature film.

In 2008, The Library of America selected Talese’s 1970 account of the Charles Manson murders, “Charlie Manson's Home on the Range,” for inclusion in its two-century retrospective of American True Crime.

In popular culture[link]

Gay Talese appeared in several strips of the comic Doonesbury, giving an interview to radio host Mark Slackmeyer to promote his book Thy Neighbor's Wife. Trudeau depicted him wearing a pith helmet to represent his journey into dangerous journalistic terrain.

Mentioned in the lyrics of the Pete Townshend song "Communication."

Awards and honors[link]

• 2011: Norman Mailer Prize, Distinguished Journalism

This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it.

Bibliography[link]

Books

• The Silent Season of a Hero: The Sports Writing of Gay Talese (Walker & Co. 2010)
• A Writer's Life (2006)
• The Gay Talese Reader: Portraits and Encounters (2003)
• Writing Creative Nonfiction: The Literature of Reality (1995) co-author with Barbara Lounsberry
• Unto the Sons (1992)
• Thy Neighbor's Wife (1981)
• Honor Thy Father (1971)
• Fame and Obscurity (1970)
• The Kingdom and the Power (1969)
• The Overreachers (1965)
• The Bridge: The Building of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge (1964)
• New York: A Serendipiter's Journey (1961)

References[link]

External links[link]

• Official website
• Gay Talese at the Internet Movie Database
• "Gay Talese", Big Think
• Katie Roiphe (Summer 2009). "Gay Talese, The Art of Nonfiction No. 2". The Paris Review. http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5925/the-art-of-nonfiction-no-2-gay-talese. 
• "Gay Talese talks with David L. Ulin". The Los Angeles Times. October 15, 2010. http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2010/10/gay-talese-talks-with-david-l-ulin.html. 
• "Gay Talese Reads from Thy Neighbor's Wife", Vanity Fair, April 14, 2009
• "Gay Talese: 'Sinatra Has a Cold'", NPR, September 9, 2003

This article may contain improper references to self-published sources. Please help improve it by removing references to unreliable sources, where they are used inappropriately. (December 2008)

Jeff Jarvis
Jeff Jarvis at the 2008 World Economic Forum.
Born	(1954-07-15) July 15, 1954 (age 57)
Occupation	Journalist, College Professor, Show host

Jeff Jarvis (born July 15, 1954) is an American journalist. Previously he was a television critic for TV Guide and People magazine, creator of Entertainment Weekly, Sunday editor and associate publisher of the New York Daily News, and a columnist on the San Francisco Examiner.

Career[link]

Jarvis was president and creative director of Advance Internet, the online arm of Advance Publications. He currently consults for Advance Internet. He has also consulted for the New York Times Company at About.com, where he worked on content development and strategy. In 2006 he became an associate professor at City University of New York's Graduate School of Journalism, directing its new media program.^[1] He has a fortnightly column in the MediaGuardian supplement of the British newspaper The Guardian.

In 1974 Jarvis was an undergraduate at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University when he was hired by the Chicago Tribune. Jarvis first began his career in journalism writing for the Addison Herald-Register, a weekly newspaper, in 1972.

He was one of the first to report on the aftermath at the World Trade Center attacks, having just arrived on the last train from New Jersey as the first plane struck. Instead of running to safety, he chose to stay, talking with survivors and making notes, until he was caught up in the maelstrom of the South Tower falling. The experience was what spurred him on to his new "career" as a blogger.

Jarvis is the creator of the popular weblog BuzzMachine, which tracks developments in new media and chronicles some of the author's personal obsessions, such as the fortunes of radio host Howard Stern. He gained national notoriety when he wrote about his negative experiences in dealing with Dell Computer's customer support system on the website.

He is a co-host on This Week in Google along with Leo Laporte and Gina Trapani, a show on the TWiT Network which covers cloud computing and social networking.

Jeff Jarvis, 2008.

In 2009, Jarvis wrote a book called, What Would Google Do? In the book, he discusses how companies can become successful like Google, and talks about how Google, and other top websites, such as Facebook, Craigslist, Wikipedia, and Digg, have changed the business model. He gives advice on how companies can copy Google's success, and how other successful companies have already done so, such a Dell and Apple.^[2]

In 2011, Jarvis published, "Public Parts: How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves the Way We Work and Live," in which he defends the openness of the Internet, discusses ways in which the Internet has made modern life public, and argues against regulations to protect privacy. "Public Parts" was reviewed scathingly by fellow internet scholar, Evgeny Morozov, in the November 3, 2011, issue of The New Republic.^[3]

Politics[link]

Jarvis describes himself as "a liberal: a centrist leaning left," claiming to have voted for Democrats in most elections. Nonetheless, he notes that he upsets some Democrats for not always agreeing with them and for linking to those with whom they disagree. Jarvis says that is why he likes the blogosphere so much: because it allows him to talk with people whose opinions do not align with his views.^[4] Jarvis also describes himself as "a post-9/11 hawk."

Personal life[link]

On Monday, August 10, 2009, Jarvis announced on his blog that he had been diagnosed with prostate cancer. The cancer was detected at an early stage and was subsequently treated by robotic surgery. He was pronounced "cured" as the cancer was contained in the prostate and had not spread to other organs. His very public revelation and reporting of his condition was (according to Jarvis) aimed at encouraging others to, in his words "I also hope to be one more guy to convince you men to get your PSA checked: a small mitzvah in return for my luck."^[5]

Publications[link]

• What Would Google Do?, New York: Collins Business 2009, 272 pages, ISBN 0-06-170971-9.
• Public Parts, New York: Simon & Schuster 2011, 272 pages, ISBN 1-4516-3600-8.
• Gutenberg the Geek, Amazon 2012, 20 pages, ASIN B007EI62I0.

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Jeff Jarvis

• BuzzMachine.com
• Jeff Jarvis on Twitter
• Jarvis' audio account of his personal experience of the attack on the World Trade Center
• The World Trade Center Tragedy: An eyewitness account, Jarvis' written account of 9/11
• BusinessWeek podcast with Jarvis, about Recovery 2.0, September 2005
• Jeff Jarvis, On the Inside, Blogging Out, Washington Post article, May 2005
• Corante.com interview with Jarvis in The Future of Digital Media series, November 2004
• Criticism of Jeff Jarvis' credentials as "Web Guru," by Ron Rosenbaum, Slate, Nov. 11, 2008
• Cover story about Jeff Jarvis as a "Web Guru," by John Koblin, The New York Observer, Nov. 25, 2008
• Conversation with Jeff Jarvis, Intruders tv, May 5, 2009 Video
• Interview in Italian, Il Sole 24 Ore
• Interview with Jeff Jarvis: Social Media Challenges International Organizations by Joerg Wolf, Atlantic Community

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (July 2007)

Andrew Jaspan, a British journalist, was appointed in October 2004, as Editor-in-Chief of The Age, a broadsheet daily newspaper published in Melbourne, Australia. Prior to this appointment, he was the founder and editor of the Sunday Herald in Scotland from 1999 to 2004. Under Jaspan's editorship, the Sunday Herald won numerous internationally recognised SND awards.

Previously, Jaspan was Editor of The Observer from 1995-1996 and Editor of The Scotsman and Scotland on Sunday and is also a former Editor-in-Chief and Publisher of The Big Issue.

Early life[link]

Andrew was born in Manchester and lived in Australia, in the Hunter Valley, Canberra and Perth between the ages of seven and fourteen. After returning to Britain but before embarking on a career in journalism, he was manager for The Smirks, a Manchester band. He joined The Daily Telegraph as a reporter in 1980 before moving to The Daily Mirror and The Sunday Times.

Innovative Newspaper Styles[link]

Jaspan's newspapers tend to feature an idiosyncratic design style. In September 1995, he relaunched The Observer, with a controversial lower case, two-tone masthead and bold, stacked sans-serif headline fonts, which was a major departure from the paper's previous, more conservative design. He made similar changes to The Age, and as launch editor of the Sunday Herald, he ensured that the paper featured crisp elegant headline fonts and plenty of colour. But his style isn't to everybody's taste. After barely a year at the helm of The Observer, Jaspan was acrimoniously fired, and the subsequent editor, Will Hutton, restored the serif fonts and quickly jettisoned most of Jaspan's award-winning design flourishes. Jaspan was known to be hostile to this, and wrote in the New Statesman that he was unhappy both with the manner of his dismissal, and with the 'junking' of his editorial vision for the paper.

Tenure as editor for Melbourne Age[link]

Jaspan joined The Age as Editor-in-Chief on 18 October 2004. His arrival was not welcomed by some Age journalists who were offended by his joke (understanding the rivalry between Melbourne and Sydney, similar to that of Glasgow and Edinburgh) in saying that he was looking forward to working in Sydney.[1]. He has been tested throughout his tenure as British man leading an Australian institution - including a question on his first address to staff about who won the AFL Grand Final. He answered correctly and regained the confidence of the press staff despite his earlier ignorance of Australian geography and the situation of The Age newspaper in Melbourne not Sydney.

Since his appointment as Editor in Chief at The Age, circulation and readership figures - as well as online figures - have increased significantly.

Andrew Jaspan also attracted criticism of a different kind in June 2005, when he described Iraqi kidnap victim Douglas Wood as "boorish" and "insensitive" for calling his captors "arseholes." [2]

In 2008 The Age's 235 journalists unanimously voted for a motion accusing Jaspan of degrading their ability to produce independent journalism.[3]

On 27 August 2008, The Age announced that Jaspan would be immediately replaced as editor by senior deputy, Paul Ramadge. The move came a day after Fairfax announced 550 jobs would go from its Australian and New Zealand operations.[4]

Julian Assange
Assange in Copenhagen
Born	(1971-07-03) 3 July 1971 (age 40)[1][2][3] Townsville, Queensland, Australia
Nationality	Australian
Occupation	Editor-in-chief and spokesperson for WikiLeaks, talk show host
Awards	Economist Freedom of Expression Award (2008) Amnesty International UK Media Award (2009) Sam Adams Award (2010) Le Monde Person of the Year (2010) Sydney Peace Foundation gold medal (2011) Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism (2011) Voltaire Award of the Victorian Council for Civil Liberties (2011) Walkleys Award for Outstanding Contribution to Journalism (2011)

Julian Paul Assange ( /əˈsɒnʒ/ ə-SONZH; born 3 July 1971) is an Australian computer programmer, political/internet activist, publisher, and^[4][5] journalist.^[6][7][8] He is best known as the editor in chief and founder of WikiLeaks, a media website which publishes information from whistleblowers. The site acts as a conduit for worldwide news leaks, with a stated purpose of creating open governance.

WikiLeaks has published material about extrajudicial killings in Kenya, toxic waste dumping in Côte d'Ivoire, Church of Scientology manuals, Guantanamo Bay procedures, and banks such as Kaupthing and Julius Baer.^[9] In 2010, WikiLeaks published Iraq War documents and Afghan War documents about American involvement in the wars, some of which was classified material. On 28 November 2010, WikiLeaks and its five international print media partners (Der Spiegel, The New York Times, Le Monde, The Guardian and El País) began publishing U.S. diplomatic cables.^[10]

Assange was a hacker-activist in his youth, before becoming a computer programmer and then becoming internationally renowned for his work with WikiLeaks.^[11] He has lived in several countries and has made public appearances in many parts of the world to speak about freedom of the press, censorship, and investigative journalism. He has received numerous awards and nominations, including the 2009 Amnesty International Media Award, Readers' Choice for TIME magazine's 2010 Person of the Year, the 2011 Sydney Peace Foundation gold medal and the 2011 Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism.^[12] Snorre Valen, a Norwegian parliamentarian, nominated him for the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize.^[13]

In 2010, a European Arrest Warrant was issued for Assange in relation to allegations of rape and sexual assault by two women in Sweden. Assange was arrested and after ten days in Wandsworth prison was freed on bail. On 30 May 2012 Assange lost his final Supreme Court appeal in England to avoid extradition to Sweden.^[14]