In The New Journalism Tom Wolfe tracks the development of a new journalism and the features game as he calls it. In chapter one of The New Journalism Wolfe tells the story of his move into journalism from leaving graduate school, which he seems to think is a leaping point for people to write a novel. In his early years Wolfe seemed to think that writing a novel was the overwhelming goal for any feature writers was to rent a cabin in Nebraska, disappear for 6 months and come back with a bestseller in toe. He gives the example of two features writers one being a man called Portis who Wolfe describes as “living out the fantasy” when he quits his job in London rents a fishing shack in Arkansas and comes back 6 months later with 2 bestsellers Norwood and True Grit.
Chapter two, called “Like a Novel” begins with an example the change in the way features were written. “Joe Louis: The King as a Middle Aged Man” tracked the fall of a world championship boxer into his middle aged life through several broken marriages. This article took a highly person look into his life telling the story through pieces of conversations that he had with his wife and that his friends had about him. Wolfe was shocked by this new way of writing a feature and says “what the hell is going on!” he sees the text article as a combination of a short story and a traditionally written feature article.
Wolfe sees Brelisn as a bit of a revolutionary within the world of features because he moves away from traditional columnist way of churning up the old news in a liquid oxygen powered bowling ball, and instead shocked the world by stepping out the door and finding a story. The example of Breslins work that Wolfe gives is a court case where the focus of the column is not the prosecution and the defence but instead what each party had on their pinky.
Tom Wolfe continues working through influential works that have inspired him and then seems to realise an important factor in feature writing, the role of the narrator. He says that his work on the small Sunday supplement New York made him work to grab the reader’s attention by “Yelling in their face”. A story he did about a women’s prison called Nut Heaven, in which the women would yell names at passing men until their victim stopped and then they would “suggest a lot of quaint anatomical impossibilities for the kid to perform”. This gave Wolfe the idea to move the narrator out of a passive role and instead put them in the scene yelling along with the women. He said he liked this technique because it allowed the audience to talk to the characters.
Wolfe expands on the importance of the narrator when he has the idea of changing the way the narrator talks to match the interviewee. The example he gives is feature he wrote on the drover Junior Johnson who was a NASCAR driver who learnt to drive by running moonshine. Wolfe felt that that the “century old British-tradition” which was the style in which all other narrators would talk in would contradict the way the moonshiner talked. So instead the narrator matches the character voice, he calls this device the “downstage voice” as though voice is talking downstage from the character. By 1966 he says that a new era of writing style has been created not by novelists or short story writers but by Journalists.
In chapter 3 Wolfe begins to talk about what today we would recognise as Gonzo Journalism but Capote named them non fiction novels. He describes 3 journalists who all put themselves inside their story: John Sack joined the army and went to Vietnam as a Journalist; George Plimpton joined a professional football team and Hunter Thompson “ran” with the Hells Angels.
In his final chapter he writes his four rules of new journalism after seeing how journalists have taken the technical aspects of writing away from the Novelist and put in their new set of rules. A basic overview of the 4 rules is:
Scene by scene construction. Rather than rely on second-hand accounts and background information, Wolfe considers it necessary for the journalist to witness events first hand, and to recreate them for the reader.
For example when I mentioned Sack, Plimpton and Thompson who all put themselves inside their work, and even risked their lives to get a fist hand account of the events.
Dialogue. By recording dialogue as fully as possible, the journalist is not only reporting words, but defining and establishing character, as well as involving the reader..
An example Wolfe gave of this would be “Joe Louis: The King as a Middle Aged Man”
The third person. Instead of simply reporting the facts, the journalist has to give the reader a real feeling of the events and people involved. One technique for achieving this is to treat the protagonists like characters in a novel. What is their motivation? What are they thinking?
This is what John Sack did in his book “M” which was his account of the Vietnamese war.
Status details. Just as important as the characters and the events, are the surroundings, specifically what people surround themselves with. Wolfe describes these items as the tools for a "social autopsy", so we can see people as they see themselves
This is noticeable at the start of The New Journalist when he introduces the New Yorker’s Newsroom.
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