The New Journalism of the Sixties
69
This also deviates from conventional journalistic practice, which strives to avoid
figuring out what people think or feel. From the New Journalist’s perspective, it
is not the event being covered that is of primary importance; it is the ways in
which people react emotionally and intellectually that provide the story’s true
angle.
Unlike conventional reporters, the New Journalists developed the habit
of staying with the people they were writing about for days or weeks at a time.
They had to gather all the material the conventional journalist was after, but then
keep going. It was crucial to the New Journalist to be there when dramatic
scenes occurred—to get the dialogue, the gestures, the facial expressions, the
details of the environment. According to Wolfe, the idea was to give the full
objective description, "plus something that readers had always had to go to
novels and short stories for: namely, the subjective and emotional life of the
character.’'65 Only by using entire scenes, extended dialogue, the point of view
of characters, and interior monologue, could writers like Didion, Wolfe,
Thompson, Mailer, and Herr attempt to come to terms with the widening social
chasms of the Sixties. Eventually, the New Journalists would be accused of
‘‘entering people’s minds” in the course of their reporting. While some people
scoffed at such a journalistic technique, many New Journalists figured it was
“one more doorbell a reporter had to push” to encounter the subjective reality of
the Sixites.66
Arizona State University
Dennis Russell
Notes
1 See Michael Schudson’s Discovering the News: A Social History o f American
Newspapers (New York: Basic Books. 1978) for an exhaustive examination o f the
ideology o f objectivity in American journalism.
2 In the inverted-pyramid style o f newswriting, stories are written with a lead paragraph
containing the most important facts, with remaining facts presented in descending order
o f importance.
3 A term coined by Joan Didion on page 85 o f the title essay in her book. Slouching
Towards Bethlehem (New York: Touchstone, 1968).
4 Id. at 84.
5 See page 23 o f Tom W olfe’s The New Journalism (New York: Harper and Row, 1973)
for the historical origin o f this term. This nonfiction also has been labeled as literary
journalism, experimental reportage, the new nonfiction,