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…

Claiming that literary newswriting is not a contradiction in terms, that is, an oxymoron, this essay examines some of the criteria against which literary newswriting can be measured, defines what constitutes literary newswriting in contemporary newspapers, and explains how it contributes to modern newswriting. The paper argues that (1) modern…

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…

Herbert L. Matthews, a veteran journalist for the "New York Times," traveled to Cuba in 1957 to interview Fidel Castro, then a revolutionary seeking the overthrow of the Batista regime. This monograph considers the impact of Matthews' newspaper articles about those interviews and of his subsequent articles about the Cuban situation and…

Offers a method for teaching students about ethical journalism and new journalism using a favorite short story and asking questions such as "How is truth in fiction different from the truth in a news story?" (SRT)

To expose a fundamental conflict in journalism between newsworthiness and objectivity (or novelty and authority) this monograph first examines the parallel between news environment and physical environment. Objectivity is defined here not as a description of the environment, but as symbols in the minds of significant publics, or…

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…

Reading, learning, and practicing various literary writing styles combines creative writing, news writing, and new journalism techniques in an advanced writing course at St. Bonaventure University. (RL)

This book, designed primarily as a college text, but also useful for self-study, as a library reference, and as a reference for cub reporters, newscasters, and associate editors, offers guidance on format and structure for the feature writer. Topics discussed include news features, brites, color stories, side bars, and think pieces, as well as…

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…