New Journalism

Inverted pyramid. Unbiased news gathering. Objectivity in reporting. Professionalism. Routines that would regulate news reports, translating information to readers, regardless of geography. Journalism spent the better part of the 20th century routinizing the news, attempting to shed its seedy past of “yellow journalism” amid the challenges of new technologies, first the radio, followed by the television. Then came the tumultuous 1950s and 1960s. Suddenly, the same tides of changes that were sweeping America's cultural and political landscape were also reshaping journalism. Journalistic trailblazers, including Truman Capote, Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer and Joan Didion were the known figures that shaped new journalism.

Thomas Kennerly Wolfe Jr., known as Tom Wolfe, was born in 1931 in Richmond Virginia. He received his educations from Washington and Lee and Yale Universities. Wolfe started as a reporter for the Springfield Massachusetts Union, which began a ten-year newspaper career. As a correspondent for The Washington Post’s Latin American newspaper, he won the Washington Newspaper Guild’s foreign news prize for his coverage of Cuba. He is known as an American journalist and novelist. Wolfe gained his fame from his studies of contemporary American culture in a unique style which is known as New Journalism. While working for the Herald-Tribune, he completed his first book. It was written for New York and Esquire and published in 1965 as The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. Wolfe’s book became a bestseller and his literary technique became known as New Journalism. New Journalism is an artistic, creative, dramatic, way of reporting and presenting the subject matter. Wolfe used colorful language and u...

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