Literary journalism

History

Literary journalism, as with every other genre of journalism, disappeared in Germany during the 1930s and 1940s, when the Nazi Party eliminated independent journalism and persecuted political dissidents, causing many journalists and intellectuals to emigrate. Narrative journalism fell out of favour with most American publications, with an exception of The New Yorker, when objectivity became a standard in American journalism in the 1920s and 1930s and journalists started using the inverted pyramid structure to write their stories. After World War II ended in 1945 with the defeat of Nazi Germany, the Allied forces took over the German news industry; presuming that subjectivity in German journalism had propagandised the public, they required Germany to adopt a wholly fact based system of reporting. Literary journalism did not return to German media until the 1960s. In the US, contrariwise, journalists who wanted to involve themselves more closely with their subjects and give their readers more intimate depictions of them recommenced to experiment with narrative in their work.