Tom Wolfe is widely regarded as the leading theorist and practitioner of New Journalism, the journalistic genre that combines the stylistic features of fiction and the reportorial obligations of journalism to produce a "novelistic sounding" but nonetheless factual literature. The saliency of Wolfe's stylistic boldness has prompted many…

In 1977, John C. Merrill, a mass communication scholar, found that many scholars believed that the sixties movement of new journalism is in some way related to existentialism. To find this out, a study identified six main themes of the philosophy of existentialism (as espoused by Jean-Paul Sartre) and looked for the presence of these themes in the…

The late Donald C. Stewart's assertion that "the era of the cognitive psychologists is waning; the era of the social constructionists is just beginning" drew attention to a major ontological and epistemological shift in composition studies. This shift demanded a methodology to accommodate it. Some composition researchers have considered…

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…

The beginning creative writer usually needs to learn the distinction between creative writing and purely informational or reportorial exposition. This can often be accomplished through writing assignments incorporating the concepts of New Journalism--the method of rendering realistically, from the point of view of an outsider who has temporarily…

William Hard was a creative and prolific writer of popular magazine journalism who used a rich variety of literary styles and techniques to tell his stories. His best work, which appeared in "Everybody's Magazine" from 1907 to 1911, shows characteristics that support the suggestion that Hard be considered among those writers Tom Wolfe…

It is argued that expressive writing strategies, particularly those used by New Journalists, may eventually serve as models for case reporting in social science research. New Journalism refers to a movement begun in the 1960's that strives to reveal the story hidden beneath surface facts. It involves the use of fictive techniques applied to the…

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…

The net effect of the early experiences of writing "compositions" which involved either describing the circumstances of a student's life or recounting the kinds of events encapsulated in that proverbially hack title, "What I Did on My Summer Vacation," has been a tendency for older teachers to devalue nonfiction as an object of…

A comparison is made between the tools of observation and research used by journalists to study society and the media, and the qualitative and clinical research tools used in the social and psychological sciences. The first part of the paper, a journalistic approach to sociology, traces the notion of the sociologist as a super-reporter using…

This paper discusses the concept of popular culture, relating it to new journalism as a phenomenon which reflects the popular images of society. Style is the essential element of popular culture so that the kind of writing presently known as new journalism is the ultimate example of the philosophy that style is supreme. But the style of the best…

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…

This paper discusses the evolution of development journalism into development communication, concentrating in the process on what has happened to government-media relationships and traditional freedom of the press notions as Third World presses are subjected to guidance policies and rampant authoritarianism. It looks at the use of mass media in…

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…