The New Journalism, which uses literary techniques usually restricted to fiction, has been categorized and analyzed from a number of perspectives, but little effort has been made to delineate its intellectual and philosophical roots. The New Journalism arose from the intellectual tradition of Romanticism, as opposed to Classicism, the movement…

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…

The debate between objective and new journalism centers upon the question of which approach factually depicts reality. Both genres, however, are part of one fact/fiction matrix in which all narrative forms since John Locke have been based upon factuality. The difference between the genres is that new journalism relies upon the sensory data of…

More than 100 decontextualized, formalistic paradigms of the narrative process are in existence, but little work has been done to apply the insights narrative theory yields to news and journalistic form. Given the journalistic assumption that facts can be presented neutrally, news professionals tend to maintain that narratives do not exist outside…

In the interest of applying reader response theory to journalism this paper posits that readers of newspapers, like readers of literature, take an active role in making meaning from the articles they read, rather than passively accepting news as a finished, static product. Additionally, it proposes that journalism textbooks pay little attention to…