The purpose of a semester course for journalism and creative writing students at Washington University was to help students, through reading and writing portraits in "new journalese," become capable critics of new journalistic writing. Students first were introduced to the techniques of new journalism in Tom Wolfe's book on new journalism and in…

This paper describes an episode in the history of journalism that reveals a continuing tension in news reporting. Dating from the invention of the telegraph in the late nineteenth century, news reports have been increasingly patterned after either a "scientific" or a "literary" model. The scientific report is based on irreducible facts, high-speed…