tom wolfe, reporter his relationship to old new ....pdf

Journal of Magazine and New Media Research Vol. 9, No. 1, Fall 2006 1 Tom Wolfe, Reporter: His Relationship to Old New Journalism and to New New Journalism Doug Cumming Washington & Lee University ******@ Continuities and Origins Tom Wolfe ambles from the rear of this enormous ballroom in Boston where about 500 journalists, many of them star writers or fu ture star writers for a variety of American newspapers and magazines, wait in silence. He is a familiar figure to this crowd, though at 74, his sharp-nosed prep-school looks have turned a bit wizen and one shoulder of his trademark white-suit jacket drapes, cape-fashion, over his left arm, which is in a sling. He rises to the lectern to kick off this Ha rvard conference on narrative journalism, and delivers the day’s key-note address. These are not just journalists, but practit ioners of a strand of news writing that consciously claims a literary pedi gree going back to the een th century, at least. In its ordinary guise in your local pape r, it is merely feature writ ing, the soft lead, or one of those Sunday stories that runs on and on. But th is tradition of American journalism has its occasional outbreaks of revolutionary fire, and one of those was led by Tom Wolfe in the 1960s and ‘70s under the banner of the New Journalism. The techniques used by Wolfe and his pany in Esquire , New York , Harper’s , and Rolling Stone became absorbed into the bloodstream of magazine and newspaper writing in the 1980s and ‘90s. These techniques, beneath the surface razzle-d azzle, were a handful of methods borrowed from fiction. Wolfe defined the New Journali sm by identifying four of these: scene, dialogue, point-of-view, and status detail. The difference—and Wolfe repeatedly claimed this made it superior to contemporary fic tion—was that it was all true. This required more than basic fact-gathering. It required wh at he called “saturati on reporting,” vacuum- cleaning every la