New Journalism

New Journalism is a form of literary journalism which was developed in the 1960s and 1970s and was associated primarily with American writers and journalists. The "new journalists" applied techniques commonly associated with fiction, including: scene-by-scene construction, extensive dialogue, point of view, detailed characterization, and a distinctive authorial voice to factual reporting, traditionally meant to be objective. The approach developed partly in response to writers’ belief that conventional news forms did not adequately convey the social and cultural changes of the period.

Writers commonly associated with New Journalism include Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Joan Didion, Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, Hunter S. Thompson, and Michael Herr. The term was popularized by Wolfe and E. W. Johnson’s 1973 anthology The New Journalism.

New Journalism developed largely in magazines, where editors could provide writers with more space and stylistic freedom than conventional newspaper reporting generally allowed. These publications included Esquire, New YorkMagazine, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, and Harper’s.