As a newspaper freak, my year of living in Manhattan at the end of the 1960s turned out to be quite an experience. Journalism was going through experimental changes, especially in New York-based media. I later learned it was called New Journalism.
Reading the obituary last month about Jimmy Breslin (1928-2017), a cocky, creative and relentless reporter and part of the movement, reminded me of those days. His articles in the New York Herald Tribune were attention-grabbing and mesmerizing.
Other journalists wrote similarly in newspapers, Sunday supplements, and magazines such as Esquire, The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly. The movement became a game changer for journalism.
News-writing until then was more formal and objectively written in a neutral voice. Reporters used a conventional graph to format a news article.
Called an “inverted pyramid,” it was like an upside-down triangle with the required information on what, when, where, who, why and how inserted at the top or first paragraph. Minor information and facts followed down to the tip of the triangle.
Reporters themselves remained invisible by avoiding the use of personal writing voices. While news itself might be interesting, this format could be boring to read.
After World War II, Americans still preferred fiction to nonfiction but wanted more information in magazines and books as well as traditional newspapers. They spent the first part of the 1950s putting the war years behind them while living in a democracy with a sense of near-innocence.
It proved to be the calm before the storm of social upheaval coming next.
Tom Wolfe (The New Journalism, 1973) described that time:
“The Sixties was one of the most extraordinary decades in American history in terms of manners and morals. Manners and morals were the history of the Sixties. … when historians write about the 1960s in America …, they won’t write about it as the decade of the war in Vietnam or of space exploration or of political assassinations … but as the decade when manners and morals, styles of living, attitudes toward the world changed the country more crucially than any political events.”
Reporters in New York during those years such as Gay Talese, Joan Didion, Clay Felker, Terry Southern, Truman Capote, Norman Mailer among a long list were restless with the status quo of bland hard news.
These reporters wanted some excitement in their work. They worked to make news more like short stories by using unconventional nonfiction writing techniques.
Wolfe described traditional journalism as the “beige voice.” One might remember an example of that “beige voice’ with the frequent use of “one” instead of more personal pronouns like “you” or “I.”
Another description of nonfiction of that time was “brain-candy writing,” superficial instead of with depth, intellectual without emotion. One can perhaps understand why New Journalists chose to personalize their writings.
What were these methods? Below are four crafting examples Wolfe mentions in his book.
1. Create a scene to set the story instead of writing historical narratives.
2. Use one person’s point of view rather than omniscient or invisible points of view.
3. Dialogue as conversation rather than paraphrasing or using as short quotes.
4. Use of details to create a tone or mood, lifestyles and character description through the use of words and sounds.
Such wording can be seen in the title of an early article done by Wolfe. He had attended a customized car show in Los Angeles in 1963 on assignment for Esquire but found himself with writer’s block to write it with the traditional layout.
Instead, he wrote the article and titled it There Goes (Varoom! Varoom!) That Kandy-Kolored (Thphhhhhh!) Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (Rahghhh!) Around the Bend (Brummmmmmmmmmmmmmm)… It later kicked off a book of collected essays.
About this time, Breslin had a desk at the New York Herald Tribune but took a different stance about reporting. He discovered that a columnist could leave the building to go outside and find information on his own, not just sit at his desk all day.
“Breslin worked like a Turk,” writes Wolfe. “He would be out all day covering a story, come back at 4 p.m. and sit down at a desk in the middle of the city room …. He was a good-looking Irishman with lots of black hair and a great wrestler’s gut.
“When he sat down at his typewriter, he hunched himself over into a shape like a bowling ball. He would start drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes…. Thus fired up, he would start typing. I’ve never seen a man who could write so well against a daily deadline.”
An example of Breslin’s approach came with President John F. Kennedy’s assassination.
Instead of relating facts about the parade, shooting and follow up, Breslin interviewed the Parkland Memorial Hospital surgeon who treated Kennedy, the Catholic priest who gave the last rites, and the funeral director who chose a bronze casket to carry the president’s body back to Washington, D.C.
In Washington, D.C., he ignored the funeral ceremonies and interviewed a $3.01 an hour equipment operator who dug Kennedy’s grave at Arlington National Cemetery. These interviews became his columns.
In 1986, Breslin was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for his writings about ordinary people.
Los Angeles Times columnist Jack Smith once described Breslin’s writing style as being “like an Irish wind that has blown through Queens and Harlem and Mutchie’s bar. It is a pound of Hemingway and a pound of Joyce and 240 pounds of Breslin.”
These adaptations of fiction are now common even in more conservative papers like The Wall Street Journal. Articles will start out with an anecdote, question or intriguing quote as ways to pull readers into the topic.
Talese speaking on a Yale University panel emphasized the need for truth during these changes. “In creative nonfiction the rules of accuracy must not be violated. All that we write should be verifiable.”
By the 1980s, New Journalism showed signs of being overdone. Wolfe’s use of multiple exclamation marks!!!!!!! had become clichés. Other methods fell into the same category. Many of the journalists took their flamboyant method of reporting to writing novels.
Most of the original New Journalist writers have gone on to publishing bestseller books such as Truman Capote‘s In Cold Blood, Mailer’s The Armies of the Night, George Plimpton‘s Paper Lion, Hunter Thompson‘s The Hell’s Angels, Joe McGinniss‘ The Selling of the President 1968, and Didion’s Slouching Toward Bethlehem.
Not all was perfection, though. Criticism followed New Journalism. Jack Newfield, a reporter at the time, wrote a Village Voice article in 1972 about his take on New Journalism.
“Is there a ‘new journalism’? It is a false category. There is only good writing and bad writing, smart ideas and dumb ideas, hard work and laziness.”
While the practice of journalism had improved during the past 15 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.
Breslin took a similar 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.”
New Journalism might not have been defined as some wish, but its effect on today’s writing continues. It can draw readers in. I am among them.
— Noozhawk columnist Susan Miles Gulbransen — a Santa Barbara native, writer and book reviewer — teaches writing at the Santa Barbara Writers Conference and through the Santa Barbara City College Continuing Education Division. Click here to read previous columns. The opinions expressed are her own.
