While the novelists of the sixties were struggling to create narrative forms more closely fitted to the bizarre social reality of American life, a group of reporters began experimenting with fictional techniques in an effort to reconceive American journalism. Even Tom Wolfe, whose name has become almost synonymous with the term new journalism readily acknowledges the inadequacy of the name. Like "the New Humanism, the New Criticism, and the New Frontier," Wolfe explains, "a movement, group, party, . . . philosophy, or theory with 'New' in it, is just begging for trouble."' Nonetheless, the variety of changes in reporting techniques and in the form and style of the journalistic article arising in the sixties have collectively been identified with that name. The new journalism differs from the conventional reporting practiced in most newspapers and magazines in two main ways: (1) the reporter's relationship to the people and events he describes reflects new attitudes and values; and (2) the form and style of the news story is radically transformed through the use of fictional devices borrowed from short stories and novels.

The most important difference between the new journalism and traditional reporting is the writer's changed relationship to the people and events he depicts. Traditionally, the straight news article is based upon an "objectivity" that requires a commitment to telling both sides of the story, and an impersonality on the part of the journalist characterized by the lack of value judgments and emotionally colored adjectives. Michael J. Arlen describes the standard journalistic practice in America until the changes of the last decade as the functional use of language: "The American press rested its weight on the simple declarative sentence. The no-nonsense approach. Who-what-where-when. Clean English, it was later called when people started teaching it at college. Lean prose."

In sharp contrast to the "objectivity" that the reporter strives for in the standard news article, the voice of the new journalist is frankly subjective; it bears the stamp of his personality. Such colorful writers as Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer openly flaunt their subjectivity. Less interested in official statements to the press corps by powerful spokesmen and the need for balance, the new journalist records his personal reactions to the people and events that make news.

The new journalist's stance is often openly critical of the powerful interests that control the dissemination of the news. By revealing his personal biases, the new journalist strives for a higher kind of "objectivity." He attempts to explode the myth that any report can be objective by freely admitting his own prejudices. The tradition of objectivity became a fact of life in American journalism about the turn of the century with the development of the major wire services. Until the changes introduced in the last decade, it has dominated most of American journalism. With the ever-widening gap between the statements of official spokesmen and the events beneath the surface in the sixties, however, a new approach has emerged.

Literary critic Robert Scholes has praised Wolfe and Mailer, calling them "hystorians," since they record the hysteria of contemporary life:

The hystorian operates differently from the orthodox journalist. Perhaps the credulous believe that a reporter reports facts, and that newspapers print all of them that are fit to print. But actually newspapers print all of the "facts" that fit, period--that fit the journalistic conventions of what "a story" is (those tired formulas) and that fit the editorial policy of the paper. The hystorian fights this tendency toward formula with his own personality. He asserts the importance of his impressions and his vision of the world. He embraces the fictional element inevitable in any reporting and tries to imagine his way toward the truth.

In terms of the reporter's attitudes and values, the new journalism reflects a decreased deference toward public officials indicative of the decline in authority throughout society. The conventional reporter typically holds a deferential attitude toward public officials and must dutifully report their statements. The usual news article often reflects, unwittingly, the official attitudes of those with vested interests in how the news gets reported. The new journalist, in contrast, strives to reveal the story hidden beneath the surface facts. Michael J. Arlen describes a hypothetical city fire to illustrate the difference in approach. In the past, Arlen notes, a reporter's facts were based on the official statements made "on the record" by the fire commissioner. "At the Fire Commissioner's briefing, for the most part no one started his camera, or pencil, until the Fire Commissioner came into the room, and walked to the lectern, had opened his Bible, and began to speak." In the new journalist's report, however, people "have a journalistic existence on either side of the event." The new kind of reporter is interested in "what went on before (and after) the Fire Commissioner came into the room. What did he do when he got on the elevator downstairs? Did he drop a quarter on the floor?" This sensitivity to actions and statements that by tradition have been "off the record" makes for colorful reporting, but it also undercuts the authority of public officials.

The new journalism also represents a change in journalistic values on a broader scale. Tom Wolfe charges that the conventional journalistic practices reflected in who-what-where-when reporting usually serve to reinforce the middle-class reader's values. Most news articles, and many feature stories, are representative of what Wolfe calls "totem newspapers." They appear on coffee tables or are simply carried around, but seldom do they jar the reader's value assumptions about the figures and events in the news. By "totem stories," Wolfe means "all those nice stories on the first page of the second section about eighty-seven-year-old ladies on Gramercy Park who have one-hundred-and-two-year old turtles or about the colorful street vendors of Havana." For Wolfe the typical newspaper until the early sixties was "the symbol of the frightened chair-armdoilie Vicks Vapo-Rub Weltanschauung that lies in the solar plexus of all good gray burghers." In contrast to this bland quality of conventional reporting, the best new journalists use a variety of writing techniques to place the reader "inside" a world he may find quite different from his own.

The second major area of change reflected in the new journalism lies in the style, language, and form of the journalistic article. Since about the forties, newspaper and magazine reporters have sporadically experimented with the storytelling techniques of fiction applied to the news feature stories. With the ever-increasing "knowledge explosion" in our society, readers have desired news coverage with greater depth and background, with psychological insights into the major figures behind the news, and with interpretation and analysis that place today's news in a broader context. The growing trend toward reporting in depth in newspaper and magazine journalism generally has led to greater freedom for writers in terms of style and form.

Such freedom has not always been the case, however. Despite individual writers of talent, most newspaper and magazine reporting until the sixties had relied upon certain formulas and conventions fitted to the editorial policy of the publication and the readership. Esquire editor Harold Hayes explains that until the rise of the new journalism:

The magazine article was a convention of writing, and those who were successful at it were those who understood the convention.... There was an anecdotal lead opening into the general theme of the piece; then some explanation followed by anecdotes or examples. If a single individual was important to the story, some biographical material was included. Then there would be a further rendering of the subject, and the article would close with an anecdote.

Although outstanding writers have often departed from the formula Hayes describes, not until the sixties have so many journalists used fictional techniques in such thorough and sophisticated ways. The new journalist's motive is to achieve a literary style comparable to fiction and to portray characters with psychological depth. The new journalism of Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin, Joan Didion, Gay Talese, and others seeks to elevate reportage to an art form by freeing it from the formulas of typical news writing. In the usual news story, the basic units are facts and quotations. In the new journalism, however, the writer attempts to reconstruct the experience as it might have unfolded. The new journalist uses literary techniques to convey information and to provide background not usually possible in most newspaper and magazine reporting.

Although he has a vested interest in the promotion of the new form, Wolfe usefully identifies four principal narrative devices common to realistic fiction as central to the new journalism: (1) portraying events in dramatic scenes rather than in the usual historical summary of most articles; (2) recording dialogue fully rather than with the occasional quotations or anecdotes of conventional journalism; (3) recording "status details," or "the pattern of behavior and possessions through which people experience their position in the world"; and (4) using point of view in complex and inventive ways to depict events as they unfold. Closely related to the techniques Wolfe lists are two additional fictional devices that have been frequently employed by the new journalists: (5) interior monologue, or the presentation of what a character thinks and feels without the use of direct quotations; and (6) composite characterization, or the telescoping of character traits and anecdotes drawn from a number of sources into a single representative sketch.

In addition to these six basic techniques, the new journalists have also used such literary techniques as flashbacks, foreshadowing, inverted chronology, and a variety of others to achieve the vivid and colorful writing usually found only in fiction. Although these techniques have been used sporadically in newspapers and magazines, since the forties, not until the sixties have they come together in such systematic ways. Let us look at how each of these techniques has been employed by a major new journalist.

1. The Dramatic Scene. Probably the most important fictional technique employed by the new journalists is the reconstruction of the story as the action unfolds, in dramatic scenes, rather than through a summary of the events. In the collection of his critical prefaces, The Art of the Novel, Henry James explains that the development of scenic depiction rather than historical summary is the distinguishing characteristic of the novel. Tom Wolfe, for example, develops the action at a party for the Black Panther Defense Fund given by conductor Leonard Bernstein in 1969 almost entirely in this way. Rather than merely summarizing the action for the reader, Wolfe shows the action moving from scene to scene as it unfolds. If the name of his protagonist had been a less famous one, Wolfe's opening paragraph might be mistaken for that of a short story:

At 2 or 3 or 4 a.m., somewhere along in there, on August 25, 1966, his forty-eighth birthday, in fact, Leonard Bernstein woke up in the dark in a state of wild alarm. That had happened before. It was one of the forms his insomnia took. So he did the usual. He got up and walked around a bit. He felt groggy. Suddenly he had a vision, an inspiration. He could see himself, Leonard Bernstein, the egregio maestro, walking out on stage in white tie and tails in front of a full orchestra. On one side of the conductor's podium is a piano. On the other is a chair with a guitar leaning against it.... He has an anti-war message to deliver to this great starched white-throated audience in the symphony hall. He announces to them: "I love." Just that. The effect is mortifying.

By beginning with this scene of Bernstein's insomniac vision, Wolfe attempts to place the reader inside the conductor's consciousness and to reveal insights about his personality to be fully developed as the story proceeds.

2. Recording Dialogue in Full. The "straight news" story is traditionally developed in the familiar "inverted pyramid" format, with the most significant facts and quotations first. Although this practice is changing in America's best newspapers, still the conventional journalist usually strives to tell who-what-where-when in the first paragraph. Although news stories frequently quote key persons, space requirements do not allow for the fully developed dialogue that has been used by the new journalists. When James Mills took to the streets of New York to trail police detective George Barrett for five months, he wrote a particularly revealing article for Life called "The Detective." Much of the power of Mills's account lies in his ability to capture Barrett's "tough cop" talk, as in this exchange after breaking up a fight between two homosexuals:

Barrett starts toward them, and a pressman says, "Look out, he has a knife." Barrett grabs the Negro by the shirt, yanks him off the victim and slams him up against the theater wall....

"Quiet!" Barrett orders. "No one talks unless I ask something. Because I won this little show, right? So we play this ball game my way." He writes their names and addresses in a notebook and then asks the one who was beaten if he wants to prefer charges. He says, "No, I just want to leave it where it's at." Barrett then asks each the same questions and gets from each the same answers:

"Are you male?"

Yes."

"Are you a homosexual?"

"Yes"

"Are you a female impersonator?"

"No."

They have said no to the last because impersonating a female is a crime, but so long as they do not actually wear female clothes they cannot be arrested....

"Hey, germ!" Barrett yells at him. "Come here!". . .

"Now." Barrett says, indicating everyone except the attacker, "all of you germs walk up this street to Broadway and get lost. Don't come back." They take off.

3. Status Details. Although the depiction of what Wolfe calls "status details" is hardly a new technique, many of the new journalists have achieved psychological depth to an unusual degree by recording "the everyday gestures, habits, manners, customs, styles of furniture, clothing, decoration . . . by which [people] experience their position in the world." Rex Reed is among those new journalists who have used these realistic details very effectively. His portrait of Ava Gardner as an aging star begins with the following description of her physical surroundings:

She stands there, without benefit of a filter lens against a room melting under the heat of lemony sofas and lavender walls and cream-and-peppermint-striped movie-star chairs, lost in the middle of that gilt-edge birthday-cake hotel of cupids and cupolas called the Regency. There is no script. No Minnelli to adjust the CinemaScope lens. Ice-blue rain beats against the windows and peppers Park Avenue below as Ava Gardner stalks her pink malted-milk cage like an elegant cheetah. She wears a baby-blue cashmere turtleneck sweater pushed up to her Ava elbows and a little plaid mini-skirt and enormous black horn-rimmed glasses and she is gloriously, divinely barefoot.

Reed brilliantly describes the colors and shapes of Ava's surroundings to provide the reader with an important introduction to her world. The style of decoration at the Regency and the clothing she wears tell us a great deal about her personality. As Wolfe readily concedes, status details have long been used in fiction to achieve a precision of characterization. With the new freedom and extended length possible in the new journalism, however, reporters are using these atmospheric details to an unprecedented degree.

4. Point of View. A fourth fictional device often used in the new journalism is the portrayal of character as if the reader understood the person's mental processes, or alternatively, from the viewpoint of others, significant in his life. Tom Wolfe explains that the new journalist uses point of view to "present every scene to the reader through the eyes of a particular character, giving the reader the feeling of being inside the character's mind." The best new journalists such as Wolfe, Gail Sheehy, Gay Talese, and Jimmy Breslin often reveal the interior thoughts and emotions of the main characters in their stories in addition to their direct speech. The normal journalistic practice is to quote the subject directly, being careful to attribute each quotation. Yet in In Cold Blood, for example, Truman Capote generates sympathy for the killers by narrating their stories from the viewpoints of comforting women close to them. In Wolfe's Esquire article about stock-car driver Junior Johnson, the narrator feigns the voice of a character from Johnson's native Ingle Hollow, North Carolina:

Working mash wouldn't wait for a man. It started coming to a head when it got ready to and a man had to be there to take it off, out there in the woods, in the brush, in the brambles, in the muck, in the snow. Wouldn't it have been something if you could have just set it all up inside a good old shed with a corrugated metal roof and order those parts like you want them and not have to smuggle all the copper and all that sugar and all that everything out here in the woods and be a coppersmith and a plumber and a cooper and a carpenter and a pack horse and every other goddamned thing God ever saw in the world, all at once.

By imitating the speech patterns and run-on sentences of a moonshiner, Wolfe conveys a sense of Johnson's background and attitudes without explicitly commenting upon them. Such a passage dramatizes his rise from a whiskey runner to well-known stock-car racer more effectively than a simple biographical summary could.

5. Interior Monologue. A distinctive use of point of view that can be considered a separate technique is interior monologue. Events are reported as if a subject were thinking them rather than through the direct quotations of the speaker. In Honor Thy Father, his account of gangland leader Joseph Bonanno, and The Kingdom and the Power, a "human history" of the New York Times, Gay Talese employs this technique quite effectively. In a panel discussion about the new journalism, Talese explained that the purpose of interior monologue is to reveal a character's thoughts and attitudes more completely and without the interruptions necessary with direct quotations:

I rarely if ever will use a direct quotation any more. I'll use dialogue, but I would never, if someone that I may be following around, should say something, I would never quote as an old New Yorker profile might quote some fisherman for 8,000 words in a row... I always take it out of quotations and use it without quotations but always attribute.... When I interview a subject, I would ask him what he thought in every situation where I might have asked him in the past what he did and said.

In The Kingdom and the Power, Talese employs the interior monologue to reveal the thoughts and attitudes of A. M. Rosenthal, whose new policies as assistant managing editor of the Times angered and upset many veteran reporters:

Seated behind his big desk in the middle of the newsroom, Rosenthal momentarily looked up from the stories that he was reading and gazed around the room at the distant rows of desks, the reporters typing, talking among themselves, sometimes looking at him in a way he suspected was hostile-they must despise me, he thought, being both irritated and saddened by the possibility, they must really hate my guts.

6. Composite Characterization. A sixth literary technique often employed in the new journalism is the creation of a composite character, a person who represents a whole class of subjects. In the best articles, these "composites" are always supported by careful interviewing and research. Gail Sheehy uses this technique effectively in a series of articles on prostitution that appeared in New York magazine. Her subsequent book Hustling (1970) begins with a sketch of "Redpants," a composite of several Times Square prostitutes Sheehy had interviewed and followed around in researching her story. The opening scene depicts "Redpants" eluding the police:

The girl in red pants walks into the Belmont Plaza all-night drugstore.

"Got a hammer? My heel came off in a chase."

She is thin as a needle, tracked in the arms and urgent around the eyes. The druggist produces a hammer. She lifts one long, exquisitely bolted leg in an arabesque--every eye in the store bleeds because her legs are still dazzling-- and she says to the druggist, "Tap it on for me, will you, sugar?"

She is wearing Gucci shoes. Remnants of a near past when the girl they called Redpants lit up this street like fireworks.

Critics of the new journalism have objected to the use of composite characters, feeling that the technique is dishonest if the reader may be deluded into thinking he is reading about an actual person. Sheehy has defended her practice in the preface where she explains: "The widow in 'The Ultimate Trick' land 'Redpants' are composites of several women, and the quotes and anecdotes supporting them are assembled from several years of acquaintance with their lives. The form is literary. The function is to present the life while protecting the privacy of perfectly decent people." At its best composite characterization allows the journalist to compress documented evidence from a variety of sources into a vivid and unified telling of the story.

Although these "fictive" techniques have been used occasionally by journalists for decades not until the sixties have they coalesced in the unique and sophisticated style of the new journalists. In the best new journalism, vivid and colorful writing complements careful research. In the hands of less scrupulous reporters, however, the urge to "fictionalize" has led to the abuse and fabrication of dialogue. In general, however, the new journalism requires extensive research and even more careful reporting than does the typical news article. In his work on In Cold Blood, Capote interviewed hundreds of individuals close to the Clutter family and to the killers, accumulating documents sufficient "to fill a small room." Wolfe's critics have charged that he was "piping it," or making up dialogue, in his article on Leonard Bernstein's radical chic party. He has defended his accuracy as follows: "I was also accused of sneaking a tape recorder into Bernstein's home in order to get the dialogue.... I took this as a great left-handed compliment to my accuracy, which I achieved in the oldest and most orthodox manner possible: I came. . . for no other reason than to write about it, arrived with a notebook and ballpoint pen in plain view and took notes." By the mid-sixties such critics as Dwight Macdonald in the New York Review of Books attacked the new journalism for turning reporting of the news into mere entertainment. Several critics have also felt that the new journalism style inspires fictionalizing, even when the reporter has been careful to verify the facts and to perform the background research necessary for the storytelling techniques the form relies on. In Fame and Obscurity, however, Gay Talese defends the new journalism against such charges and contends that the new form requires even more rigorous research than does conventional reporting:

The best new journalism, though often reading like fiction, is not fiction. It is, or should be, as reliable as the most reliable reportage although it seeks a larger truth than is possible through mere compilation of verifiable facts, the use of direct quotations, and adherence to the rigid organizational style of the older form. The new journalism allows, demands in fact, a more imaginative approach to reporting.

The new journalism demands a more intense and personal kind of interviewing and research than does traditional reporting. Tom Wolfe's term is "saturation reporting," since in order to record accurately the scenes and dialogue of events as they occur, the journalist must saturate himself in a particular environment. This method frequently requires the reporter to follow his subject around for days or even months and years with a sensitivity to certain people and events and often to a special atmosphere. Capote spent six years researching In Cold Blood and formed many close friendships with the people of Holcomb, Kansas, where the murders took place. Similarly, Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test involved him to an unusual degree in the drug scene of California. This kind of dogged "close-to-the-skin" reporting is the key to the success of most of the new journalists. Some writers are reluctant to follow their subjects around for extended periods of time, but Wolfe claims some kind of rapport must be established before the psychological depth of the new journalism can be achieved. "If a reporter stays with a person or group long enough," Wolfe explains, "they--reporter and subject--will develop a personal relationship of some kind, even if it is one of hostility."

Although the changes in narrative techniques and method inherent in the new journalism represent important differences from conventional journalism, promoters of the genre overemphasize their originality. Such outstanding reporters as Wolfe, Talese, Breslin, Didion, and others are only the most conspicuous examples of more general changes that have been occurring over the last two decades in American journalism. Former editor of the New York Times Magazine Lester Markel believes that most accounts of the rise of the new journalism give the individual reporter too much credit:

What they [the new journalists] overlook too is what they call "old" journalism is in the process of important change. Increasing emphasis is being put on interpretation--the effort to make news clear and relevant for the reader and, whenever possible, to provide an approximation of the truth. Reporting in depth--profiles with insights, round-ups, trend stories... Such pieces do not appear as often as they should, but a start surely has been made. Reporters and editors have definitely progressed.

Critics of the new journalism have been quick to point out that the personal style and fictional techniques that characterize the form are hardly "new." Indeed, the historical roots of the present reporting are probably centuries old. Tom Wolfe argues in The New journalism that an aggressive and ambitious group of feature writers at the New York Herald Tribune in the early sixties began to experiment with fictional techniques to create a livelier reporting that might save a dying newspaper. Yet in the history of journalism a number of writers and reporters have, at various times, employed the "scenic" methods and the fictive techniques that Wolfe describes. Village Voice reporter Jack Newfield defines the new journalism so broadly that writers as diverse as Daniel Defoe and Stephen Crane might qualify as practitioners:

To begin with there is not much that is new about New journalism. Personal advocacy preceded the who-what-where-when formula of the AP by a couple of centuries. Tom Paine and Voltaire were New Journalists.... Objective journalism developed with the teletype and radio news. Daniel Defoe, Stephen Crane, and Mark Twain were all New journalists according to most contemporary definitions.