Exercise (PS): It is hard to pull out all the NewJ stops in a short piece, but try. You can rewrite one of your eye-witness pieces using Wolfe's four devices and other literary techniques, or you can be a New Journalist for a day and go out and immerse yourself in a social setting. Go to the TAB and capture the buzz. Spend a day at a market stall. Spend a few hours observing your fellow creatures doing something full of social implications. Show it to us in all its glory.

Some links:

Mark Kramer's Breakable Rules of LitJourn

Chasm a forum for dark-themed fiction and literary journalism

A search for "literary journalism" also brought up this interesting site for elements of literary journalism.

And a paper, The Literary Journalists.

It all started in the 17th Century with Ned Ward and periodical pamphlets he wrote under the name of the "London Spy". You could say that Ned Ward was the first New Journalist. But since few people have heard of Ned Ward and even fewer have read his street-wise accounts of the real London, we'll have to jump to New York in the 1960's and the "birth of the New Journalism" which Tom Wolfe told us all about in a famous manifesto. You can read a version of Wolfe's manifesto in his book "The New Journalism".

New Journalism and literary journalism are pretty much the same thing, but some consider the NewJ a little more edgy than literary journalism which is the stuff of most conventional well- written non-fiction that reports on relatively current events. Literary journalism is reportage with a literary or artistic intent in that it is to be enjoyed as a good read as well as for the information it conveys. Some people call it reporting with an "aesthetic" dimension.

Tom Wolfe's New Journalism manifesto merely codified what a number of writers, including himself, were doing at the time http://www.hotwired.com/i-agent/95/29/waynew/new.html. To the horror of the "elite" novelists, some "statusphere" journos were using sacred novelistic techniques and literary devices to tell nonfiction stories. They high-jacked the style and intimacy of the novel as a means of conveying social reality. But because they were reporting reality and not inventing it, the New Journalists had to spend a lot of time investigating their material. In order to capture all the rich detail, to understand the events leading up to a situation, and to account for its aftermath and meaning, the New Journalists practiced what Wolfe dubbed "immersion" reporting and others call "participatory" reporting. They did just show up for a press conference and go back to write a tame story; they got to the event early enough to see the behind the scenes preparations such as Richard Nixon getting made-up to hide his five-o'clock shadow, and they stayed long enough to pick up the stray incriminating note from the rubbish tin. In some cases, the New Journalist spent a year or more with the people they wrote about. Hunter S. Thompson, inventor of "Gonzo" journalism, a species of NewJ, spent a year or so running with (and ways from) the Hell's Angels. Truman Capote took more than five years to write In Cold Blood, considered to be the first nonfiction "novel".

Most of what you read in the form of long magazine features, non-fiction reportage and "edgy" reportage is a legacy of the New Journalism. It seems all to normal today, but then it was new and controversial because it used "fictional" techniques which, to some, blurred the boundary between fact and fiction to the breaking point. These days, we understand that "reality" does not stand apart from the manner in which it is constructed. But we also understand the reportorial contract which stipulates that the reporter only report what he or she has observed or can confirm and so if she uses dialogue or sets a scene, she is not fictionalizing the events just because she uses a dramatic and literary writing techniques.

Here is a summary of Wolfe's four devices of NewJ by which journos "seized the power" from the fiction writers. Overall, NewJ articles "read like a short story" (Wolfe, 11) whereas conventional reporting followed the conventions of the pyramid style and used an "objective", just the facts, impersonal voice.

1. "Scene-by-scene construction, telling the story by moving from scene to scene and resorting as little as possible to sheer historical narrative" (Wolfe, 31). The ability to write scene-by-scene depends on the reporter being on the scene, "hence the sometimes extraordinary feats of reporting that the new journalists undertook: so that they could actually witness the scenes in other people's lives as they took place--and record the dialogue in full" (Wolfe, 31).

2. Being on the scene allows you to record "dialogue in full" which is the second device. According to Wolfe, the new journalists "like the early novelists, learned by trial and error something that has since been demonstrated in academic studies: namely, that realistic dialogue involves the reader more completely than any other single device. It also establishes ad defines character more quickly and effectively than any other single device" (Wolfe, 31).

3. The third device is called "third-person point of view" by Wolfe and third- person focalization by academic narratologists. It is the technique of presenting scenes "to the reader through the eyes of a particular character, giving the reader the feeling of being inside the character's mind and experiencing the emotional reality of the scene as he experiences it" (Wolfe, 32). As Wolfe points out, journalists could always use the first-person point of view, the "I was there" approach. But for a journalist, the first-person can be limiting because it only brings the reader "inside the mind of one character" -- the journo him- or herself, "a point of view that often proves irrelevant to the story and irritating to the reader" (Wolfe, 32). Using the point of view of a real participant in the story adds to the reality of the scene. But this device is tricky because in order to write from another person's point of view, the writer has to have enough knowledge of the other person's thoughts and actions. The writer acquires this knowledge from observation and interview. You have to ask the other person what he or she thinks and feels and you have to watch how they act and react. Through the device of the "omniscient narrator", fiction writers can show a scene through the eyes of a character because they've made-up the character and all the character's thoughts and feelings--they "know" all and "see" all. Nonfiction writers are not omniscient and so they have to ask the people they include in their stories. It may look that they're just guessing, but the reportorial contract assures readers that the writer based it all on interview and observation.

Wolfe's most famous example of using a character's point of view is in a piece about Phil Spector the record producer. As he wrote the scene, Wolfe created the written version of a "voice over". He describes Spector sitting in an airplane seat thinking about how afraid he is. Wolfe presents Spector's thoughts as internal monoloque, as if Spector is talking to himself. In fact, Spector voiced his thoughts about fear of flying to Wolfe during a safe-on-the- ground interview and Wolfe laid what Spector said like a sound track over the scene in the airplane. Fair? Factual? Fictional?

4. The fourth device relates to description and the "recording of everyday gestures, habits, manners, customs, styles of furniture, clothing, decoration, styles of traveling, eating, keeping house, modes of behaving toward children, servants, superiors, inferiors, peers, plus the various looks, glances, poses, styles of walking and other symbolic details that might exist within a scene" (Wolfe, 32). The key is to record the "symbolic" detail, the detail that symbolizes social life or social status. The New Journalist is mainly on the business of reporting social reality and placing people and events on social context by showing "the entire patters of behavior and possessions through which people express their position in the world or what they think it is or what they hope it to be" (Wolfe 32).

The New Journalists, Wolfe in particlar, also used typography to add voice to text. For instance, the title of one of Wolfe's pieces is "There Goes (Varoom! Varoom!) That Kandy-Kolored (Thphhhhh! Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (Rahghhh! Around the Bend (Brummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm)".

All this was quite revolutionary in nonfiction writing, now it is conventional. So from here we get the emergence of the Way New Journalism which you are free to explore. Try The birth of the Way New Journalism. It doesn't seem to be taking off and here's one reason why it isn't - The role of the reader in "Way New Journalism"

Search for the word 'Gonzo' if you want to locate some more key websites.

Other NewJ related sites: http://www.journalism.sfsu.edu, And  http://www.journalism.sfsu.edu/www/spj/spj.htm http://www.mcluhanmedia.com/mmclw001.html for a Tom Wolfe bibiolography.