New Journalism

“New Journalism” refers to a literary movement in the 1960s and 1970s that tried to expand the definition of journalism by arguing that feature writers could use the same techniques to write stories about real-life events that novelists used to write about imaginary worlds. Writers, such as Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote, and Gay Talese, often credited with launching this movement, immersed themselves in their subjects, at times spending months in the field gathering facts through research, interviews, and observation. But when they sat down to write, they produced something very different from the feature stories typically published in newspapers and magazines of the time. Instead of forcing their story into a traditional formulaic structure and institutional voice, they constructed well-developed characters, sustained dialogue, vivid scenes, ...