Literary Journalism

Scholars and observers of American journalism have spent considerable effort attempting to define a form of expression that many have come to call literary or narrative journalism. As the terms suggest, this journalistic form occupies a space between the imaginative nature of fictive literature on one hand, and the empiricism of the objective, inverted pyramid style of news report on the other. Since the New Journalism movement of the 1960s and 1970s reinvigorated an American tradition of literary journalism dating at least to the nineteenth century, the form has generated substantial professional, scholarly, and popular interest, not to mention debate. Narrative journalism can be found in magazines, books, newspapers, radio shows, broadcast news, and Internet reports. It is used to tell timely stories about actual people and events in topical areas ranging from human interest stories to business reportage to the explanation of complex medical and scientific phenomena as well as international events. Journalism schools and English departments across the United States teach courses on the form; anthologies are flourishing, as are professional and scholarly conferences attending to the form.

Historian John C. Hartsock defined “narrative literary journalism” as “those true-life stories that read like a novel or short story” while acknowledging the problematic nature of defining such an approach. Such stories, he suggested, are often allegorical, embracing the subjectivity of the author and promoting the “understanding of the social or cultural Other” (2000, 22). Thomas B. Connery preferred the term literary journalism to identify a kind of nonfiction writing that depends on traditional news gathering and reporting techniques, such as interviews and documentary review, at the same time that it values writing style and interpretation. At issue in the conversations over the appropriate definition and naming of the form is anxiety over what the terms literary, narrative, and journalism mean in the first place. Must all literary, or narrative, journalism use narrative techniques, such as scene setting and dialogue? Must it incorporate, as New Journalist Tom Wolfe has suggested, immersion reporting (the writer's deep, prolonged engagement in the world about which she is reporting)? Should it be called literary nonfiction, creative nonfiction, narrative nonfiction, journalistic nonfiction, the literature of fact, literary journalism, or narrative journalism? Despite the lack of consensus regarding the most appropriate term and definition to identify this particular kind of journalistic expression, literary journalism is a recognizable and robust historical tradition within the professional practice of American journalism.