The new left in Journalism

The reading for this week was Tom Wolfe's "The New Journalism" which outlined the transition from this traditional tabloid style to the literary and factual style of writing. Wolfe worked for the New York Herald after graduating with a doctorate in American Studies in 1957. His book based around is a collection of articles which analyse the techniques used in New Journalism such as scene setting, characterisation and writing style. Each article can be considered to be like a mini novel as readers are swept away in a world in which they could relate to while learning about an important news event tha was happening. He argues that the break away from Tabloid style writing gave reporters an opportunity to live their dream- many reporters aspired to be novelists as it was viewed as being the top of the literary heirarchy and new journalism was very similar to the novel in its form and style.

The "new Journalism" movement began after the second world war when society became more interested in what exactly was going on around the world. During this time of great conflict across the world people wanted to know about the safety of their loved ones and more personal matters rather than the latest cartoon strip or joke pages. Newspaper journalists began writing descriptive and detailed articles in an novel style fashion rather than a more conventional tabloid style. New Journalism used techniques that were more familiar to the literary world rather than the unforgiving world of  journalism.. Articles had a very sombre tone to them and were packed full of facts and detail in order to inform the public of events with as much truth as possible. Readers were immersed in a world of fiction where a narrator described a news event  to make it seem personal. The reporters did not usually express their own views in the articles but if they did their opinions were vague. It was very competitive industry as reporters would race each other to try and find the best story as the better the story the better. This style of journalism had drawbacks as reporters had the opportunity to twist articles in order to get the best response from the public and sometimes the articles did not get straight to the point and consequently, readers would lose interest.  In my opinion, this new style of journalism is beneficial as it gives the public an alternative style of writing to the ever popular tabloid format used by The Sun .