The New Journalism. Seminar Paper.

The New Journalism

The new Journalism is an anthology of Journalism put together by Tom Wolfe in 1974. In it, Wolfe writes about a change in the style of the journalism that was being produced at the time. This style of Journalism changed the standard journalistic technique of ‘telling’ to ‘seeing’, describing the scene and allowing the readers to form an opinion based on the descriptions that they were being given. Journalists began to make themselves part of the action as opposed to staying in the peripheries of the story as narrators. This led to objective pieces of journalism being left behind, to be replaced by subjective, dialogue led pieces of writing, and literary devices not dissimilar to fictional novels by the likes of Charles Dickens. Dickens would be able to tell his reader a lot about the backgrounds and personalities of his characters using physical descriptions and traits alone.

Wolfe explains how the new journalism works using four points.

1.Scene by scene construction:

This requires the Journalist to actually experience events rather than just recounting them from other sources. It also involves more detail than a typical account of an event, really allowing the reader to fully understand everything that is occurring.

2. Dialogue in full:

Dialogue needs to be recorded as accurately as possible, to give the reader a full understanding of the character, this may include writing transcribing what somebody says phonetically if for example they have an accent, or a speech impediment. When reporting what other people are saying, the reader should be reading it in their voice, not in yours.

3. Use of the third person

Pretty self-explanatory, this really helps to give the feel of a story being told.

4. Status Details

Wolf describes the 'social autopsy' that should take place when describing somebody. A description should involve small details that say things about their place in society. For example, if a journalist were describing an encounter with David Cameron, they may mention the brand of socks that he wore, and find out how much those socks cost, as to potentially portray him as wealthy.

Hunter S. Thompson, author of fear and loathing in Las Vegas, is widely regarded as a founder of ‘gonzo journalism’, a key aspect of the new journalism. In Fear and Loathing, he details a trip to Las Vegas to cover the Mint 400 motor race, with a car full of mind altering drugs and alcohol. His writing focuses on his personal experiences exactly as he saw them when intoxicated, making himself the main character in the story. Wolfe mentions that doing this can be annoying for the reader, but by involving dialogue of other characters, it ensures that the story is still told fully. Thompson constantly uses dialogue to detail the conversations that he has had with others or overheard in his surroundings. Even through his drug addled fusion of fiction and reality, Thompson manages to convey a damning social commentary of Las Vegas and America as a whole at the end of the 1960s. 

Around the time of both Wolfe and Thompson’s writings, America was undergoing huge political and social upheaval. JFK’s was seen by many as a symbol of hope, and his assassination in 1963 highlighted the problems that America was facing. The Civil right movement was in full flow, racial tensions were high and the war in Vietnam was still being fought and seen by many as an unnecessary and unwinnable war. Muhammad Ali refused to go to war and is famously quoted for saying : “I ain't got no quarrel with the Vietcong.“ There was a general anti-establishment feel attitude around the country; this was buoyed by the student protest movement and the sexual revolution. In Journalism, objectivism from officials, particularly in government was starting to be questioned. The use of LSD was common and helped finding different ways to view things. Liberation and change were the 'geist' of the time These cultural characteristics of America are all clear in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, just through Hunter S. Thompson’s description of his experiences.

Today, the new journalism can be found everywhere. TV documentaries often use gonzo journalists such as Louis Theroux to look into the lives of controversial people or organisations; TV makes this form of journalism easier, as the desired message can easily be achieved through a series of cleverly selected shots. The new journalism is also seen in fly on the wall documentaries, where there is little to no narration, and the story is told entirely through the dialogue and pictures that are chosen by the editor. Newspaper articles on a daily basis feature aspects of the new journalism, celebrity interviews and human interest stories tend to rely on minimal exposition.

Revision Notes - The New Journalism and existentialism

The New Journalism

Everything in the world was changing, and journalism was reflecting this

Television was overtaking radio, seeing rather than telling,

Photo/magazine journalism was overtaking traditional newspapers – seeing rather than telling

This was clearly the trend. Popular journalism was having to become more subjective – possibly due to a divided world. People had to report things exactly as they saw them. Individuals actions became important. John McCine rolling stone magazine. Visual generally becoming more popular.

Freudian agenda, sexual liberation, women becoming more powerful, reflecting the zeitgeist.

Heidegger – existentialism. Just being was popular, past full of guilt – living for the moment. Camus- The outsider – telling things how they are and not getting dragged down by being human with feelings and all that nonsense. Living for the moment epitomised by Woodstock – sex drugs roick and roll – fear and loathing in Las Vegas – Hunter S Thompson.

Nietzsche suggesting that rape and violence are not immoral, all just part of a big power struggle when all is set and done.

Journalists feeling the need to write copy that reflected the times.

LSD apparently introduced by the CIA to create an altered reality, what was clearly a difficult time for many people. People wanting to experience an different perception of themselves and of the world.

Breaking the rule of – never become the story

Counter culture – people experimenting with drugs and sex. – teen preggers – sticking it to the man

Dickens – realist fiction

Scene by scene construction

Dialogue in full

Third person

Status details – make things important – eg if talking about the pm showing him up to be posh, note the exact brand and price of the tie he is wearing, counter that with the person he is helping to open a youth centre. – Social Autopsy

HIPPIES

Blurring of objectivity and subjectivity

Realism

LGBT

The Verification principle in relation to Journalism.

Ayers verification principle suggests that anything that cannot be empirically or analytically verified should be discarded as nonsense. So anything that cannot be proved as a fact is essentially ‘the quacking of a duck’; absolutely meaningless. Journalism is the practice of turning information into money, if the information is not true, a journalist will not (or at least should not) make money. A journalist should always take the verification principle into account when printing statements of assertion, if they cannot be 100 per cent sure that it is factual, it should never be printed, so in that sense the verification principle is vital in relation to journalism. However, modern journalism reliues on more than facts. In any popular newspaper you will see opinion collumsn, essentially nonsense, according to Ayer anyway, but hugely popular with a modern audience. If you watch the news, a good quote will always be a comp0letely non factual statement filled with emotion.

Wittgenstein, in his tractatus argues that the world consists entirely and exclusively of facts. In a sense I suppose this is accurate, but in terms of journalism, for the sake of interesting copy at the very least, a little bit of emoting is necessary. The important thing is that journalists understand the difference between fact and opinion.

The Enlightenment, and its role in the development of the press.

The enlightenment gave birth to Journalism.  The invention of the printing press in the 1440s is regarded by many (including Einstein) as the most important in history. It meant that text could finally be mass produced. At first, this was inevitably used to print bibles during the protestant revolution. Martin Luthor wanted people to be able to read the bible in every language in the world. This gave further rise to Christianity. The printing press soon allowed early works of Journalism to make an appearance in the form of pamphleteers during the English civil war.

In 1702, the printing press printed The Daily Courant; the world’s first newspaper. This consisted of a single page with two columns, some way away from what we see in today’s newsagents.  This eventually gave rise to a host of ‘comment papers’ one of these ‘the spectator written by Joseph Addison became particularly popular with its wit, sarcasm and social commentary.  Travel journalism was popular, pamphlets were used for people to document journeys around the country, Cobbet’s Rural Rides was all about the countryside and the things that Cobbet had witnessed during his travels.

An important early piece of work was John Locke’s ‘essay concerning human understanding’. In it he puts across his ideas about empiricism, and the way in which humans pick up ideas; through sense experience. He also discusses the way in which we derive complex/abstract ideas through sense data. It’s in this essay that Locke coins the phrase ‘Tabula Rasa’ meaning blank slate to describe the human mind at birth.  The essay is one of the key sources of empiricism, which is an invaluable tool for journalists.  He refutes rationalist assertions in part one,  sets out his theory of ideas in part 2, discusses language in part 3 and talks about knowledge in part 4.  

The Yellow Press

Modern Journalism as we know it started in America in the 19^th century.  In the 1840s People from around the world were travelling to California, hoping to find gold in rich mines in what is now aptly known as ‘the Californian gold rush.  Life in Europe wasn’t much fun; poverty and war were causing people to seek a better life in the states.  The Irish were going through a pretty nasty famine, which encouraged a huge flux of migration to America.   

One of the early ‘gold miners’ was George Hearst, father of William Randolph Hearst. He allegedly won The San Francisco Examiner in a poker game and in 1887 passed it down to his son, William Randolph Hearst; one of the fathers of journalism as we know it today.  Before this time, newspapers were reasonably boring affairs, either used for political propaganda, or aimed at the upper classes and intellectuals. Hearst changed this, by removing large blocks of text, instead preferring large pictures, and attention grabbing headlines, the front page was everything to him. This gave him a larger, broader readership, including Americas newly acquired immigrants and people of a lower social standing allowing him to Purchase the New York Morning Journal.

The Morning Journal’s only real rival was The New York World, bought by Joseph Pulitzer in 1883, it regularly received a daily circulation of 1 million. There was a real circulation war between these two papers, who garnered the nickname, ‘the yellow press’ due to them both publishing the same cartoon ‘yellow kid’ for a year after a row regarding the ownership of it. Yellow press is still what we see in Newspapers today, with large catchy headlines, pictures and general sensationalism.

Tv is now beginning to kill of newspapers, circulation falling and falling, some don’t even make a profit anymore

1920s to present day.

Tabloid nation,

Baby boom – daily mirror taking the audience of those who didn’t have a tv and didn’t want to read a broadsheet.

Added Objectivity, before all too politically biased.

. News agenda also began to change around this time, crime and punishment always high on the agenda.

Romanticism and Rousseau.

At the end of the 18^th century, the enlightenment was starting to get a little bit dry. For a long time, art, music and literature were all largely influenced by Christianity, which had taken a real stronghold over Europe. There had been great leaps in learning discovery (thanks to the invention of the printing press) and people were just generally starting to ‘know’ more. Everyone was very empirical, clever and boring.

  The Romantic Movement changed this idea of needing to know stuff, largely thanks to Rousseau. He believed that humans should be content with nature. He stated, ‘man is born free but everywhere is in chains’.  He believed that man is a ‘noble savage’ meaning that we should live as in a state of nature. Civilisation is restricting us from living our lives as they should be lived. He believes that we should step back to nature and live like the animals that we technically are. He struggled with the notion of truth, and said that nature is the only real truth. Rousseau realised that completely reverting to nature was unrealistic for humans, but suggested a way that he believed we could benefit from civilisation in his book, ‘the social contract’.

Here he suggests that people as a whole or ‘the sovereign’ as he refers to the idea should act in a way that benefits ‘the sovereign’. People’s individual wills are selfish, but what he calls ‘the general will’ would be beneficial to all. He recommends only a limited government that could intervene with regards to the distribution of property, in a similar fashion to Locke’s ideas.

This led to the idea of Romantic Nationalism, nations governing from the bottom up, and that geography should define a nation’s identity. He saw that ‘nations’ should be made up of small communities, none too big to be able to walk in a day.