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e New Journalism and the Struggle for
Interpretation
John J. Pauly
Marquee University*.(-/!4+7,!104%9%%$4
##%/3%$5%12).-. Journalism: eory, Practice & Criticism .+.4+7
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Marquette University
e-Publications@Marquette
Communication Faculty Research and Publications/College of
Communication
This paper is NOT THE PUBLISHED VERSION; but the author’s final, peer-reviewed manuscript.
The published version may be accessed by following the link in the citation below.
Journalism: Theory, Practice & Criticism, Vol. 15, No. 5 (2014): 589-604. DOI. This article is ©
SAGE Publications and permission has been granted for this version to appear in e-
Publications@Marquette. SAGE Publications does not grant permission for this article to be
further copied/distributed or hosted elsewhere without the express permission from SAGE
Publications.
Contents
Abstract......................................................................................................................................................... 2
Keywords................................................................................................................................................... 2
The interpretive turn in American journalism .............................................................................................. 5
Institutional origins of the New Journalism.................................................................................................. 9
Interpretation and the quest for moral purpose ........................................................................................12
Funding .......................................................................................................................................................13
Notes...........................................................................................................................................................13
References ..................................................................................................................................................13
The New Journalism and the struggle for
interpretation
John J. Pauly
Marquette University, Milwaukee, WI
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Abstract
Scholarship in literary journalism often focuses on matters of technique and style, and on the ethical
challenges of immersion reporting. In some contexts, however, literary journalism may also take on a
sense of moral purpose, as when reporters assert the importance of their interpretations, or readers
attribute special meaning to a particular style of writing. The New Journalism of the 1960s and 1970s
offers a revealing example of how magazine and book publishing markets and writer–editor relations
inevitably shape journalists’ interpretations and lend them a sense of social significance. The New
Journalism did not stand alone and apart from the larger profession, but took root within a network of
writers, editors, and publishers, and grew out of a wider, ongoing debate over the nature of journalists’
interpretive responsibilities.
Keywords
Interpretive reporting, journalism ethics, literary journalism, magazine publishing, narrative
journalism, New Journalism, objectivity
Two years into his term as editor-in-chief of Harper’s magazine, Willie Morris would ponder the task he
had set for himself. He had been chosen in 1967, at age 32, to make the nation’s oldest magazine more
relevant and contemporary, and by all accounts had done just that. Morris had devoted an entire issue
to Norman Mailer’s edgy account of the March on the Pentagon (and another to an excerpt from
William Styron’s controversial novel Confessions of Nat Turner); created a home for talented reporters
like David Halberstam, Larry L. King, Gay Talese, and Marshall Frady; and inspired occasional expressions
of concern and outrage from long-time readers and some of the magazine’s sales people. Now, writing a
progress report for his publisher, John Cowles Jr, from ‘somewhere in Minnesota’, Morris (1969) cited
Mailer’s stories on the Pentagon march and the 1968 political conventions as exemplars of the
new Harper’s. Mailer had done nothing less than ‘revolutionize magazine journalism by an inventive
new form which probed the realities behind contemporary politics and protest’. He had ‘brought the
journalistic and literary impulses together, making of reportorial approaches an abiding imaginative
literature’. Looking to the future, Morris argued, Harper’s ‘must go deeper, to real human causes, to the
core and substance of our malaise’, and ‘show its readers where the country is going and try to do
something about it’.
Anyone who studies literary journalism will find such claims familiar. Our scholarship often speaks of the
personal engagement that immersion reporting requires, and the deep truths about human behavior
that it seeks. Literary journalists (and the scholars who love them) imagine themselves on an
interpretive quest in which reporters deploy an ensemble of literary techniques to make sense of ‘true
stories’ (Sims, 2007). That quest is at once epistemological, existential, and ethical. Literary journalists
assert a knowledge claim when they reject the traditional news story’s contrived display of objectivity
and routinized, formulaic structure. They seek to capture social complexity in all its richness and nuance,
and to celebrate the integrity and cultural authority of the individual reporter. Sometimes, this quest
carries existential overtones. ‘We tell ourselves stories in order to live’, was Joan Didion’s (1979) much-
quoted formulation: ‘We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder
of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices’ (p. 11). As David
Eason (1990) has perceptively argued, the unwillingness of writers such as Mailer and Didion to accept
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easy closure in their reports signified the immensity of the interpretive task they faced and the frailty of
the narratives we use to make sense of the world. Finally, literary journalism has often embodied a
sense of moral purpose, as when Morris’ report to his publisher defends his writers’ effort to blend
literature and reportage, write stylishly, and confront ‘our malaise’.
If we remember that Morris is writing a report to his publisher, we may notice something else: a
conviction that Harper’s approach to literary journalism grows out of the specific social and political
conditions of that era. Elsewhere in his report, Morris describes his magazine as confronting a moment
when ‘America is profoundly at war with itself’; as editor, he feels the need to ‘act upon … the doubt
and turmoil and uneasiness of his generation’. I want to argue that we need a more institutionally
situated history of literary journalism to place alongside our studies of writerly technique.
1
Long-form
narrative reporting must find its niche within an existing system of media production and distribution. It
addresses its claims for distinction to social peers (or would-be peers) who serve as gatekeepers of
literary reputation. Market demand and reader demographics make some styles of work more
commercially plausible than others. Organizational routines – how editors solicit, read, and critique
submissions – shape a story’s final form. And the relations connecting these participants – writers,
editors, readers, publishers, critics – are mediated by the larger society’s discourse, which assigns value
and status to their activities. In a dozen different ways, literary journalism not only reports on society
but enacts the social: in the imagined reader that it addresses, in the authorial voice the writer chooses,
in the venue chosen to distribute the story, and in the meaning imputed to its reports.
The New Journalism of the 1960s illustrates the methods and value of an institutionally situated
approach to the history of literary journalism.
2
This is because the New Journalism aroused extensive
comment in its time; advocates and critics alike believed it was something worth arguing about. That era
has also left a considerable archival record that documents the market strategies of magazines such
as Esquire, New York, and Harper’s, and the relations between its writers, editors, readers, and
publishers, making it easier to learn about the organizational processes that ushered the stories into
print. My argument seeks to sharpen and qualify the familiar claim that the New Journalism was an
expression of its times. The work that commentators labeled New Journalism was more than a response
to a moment of widespread discontent, more than the coming of age of a new generation of inventive
writers, and more than the sign of a wider revolt into style. It was also a response to a broader
interpretive crisis in the journalism profession that was decades in the making. The New Journalism was
the product of many forces, including changes in the media marketplace, reporters’ dissatisfaction with
newspaper careers, collaborations between talented writers and visionary editors, and a sustained
epoch of social dislocation that made understanding public life an urgent task for writers, readers, and
publications.
Using the New Journalism as our example also allows us to reconsider how we approach the history of
literary journalism more generally. Questions of continuity and discontinuity run through all forms of
historical writing, of course, but have been particularly vexing in studies of literary journalism. John
Hartsock’s (2000) history of the field, for example, reminds us of the form’s long traditions of
‘heightened subjectivity’ (p. 247). Much of the scholarship published in the journal of the International
Association for Literary Journalism Studies similarly stresses continuities in the genre across national
boundaries and epochs. At other moments, our historiography emphasizes discontinuity, as scholars
attempt to distinguish literary journalism from conventional news reporting, the essay, and the memoir.
And so the debate rages. Should we portray literary journalism as a continuous tradition of literary
invention? Or as a stylized approach to journalism distinct from the more familiar and conventional
work that surrounds it? The decision to stress continuity or discontinuity may depend less upon our
judgment of the essential traits of an individual work than upon the sorts of evidence we choose to
examine. If we focus on literary technique, we will more easily notice the use of similar narrative devices
in different combinations across time and space (Bak and Reynolds, 2011). If we focus on the meanings
attributed to certain styles of work, however, we will more easily notice discontinuity; the same style of
work, resituated, might be taken to mean something different. The institutional history of literary
journalism that I propose emphasizes questions of this second sort. It does not displace the study of
technique, but it does seek to emphasize processes of production and the culturally specific ways in
which groups attribute meaning to a particular writer, publication, or narrative style at a given moment.
The New Journalism aptly illustrates the value of this approach. The discussion of whether it was
actually new is bootless, as is the conclusion that it must have been meaningless if its advocates cannot
convince us that it was new, as claimed. Criticisms of the texts themselves cannot explain why advocates
considered it something different, or why critics felt compelled to debunk its novelty. The meaning of
the New Journalism emerges only out of the close study of the institutional relationships that gave it life.
My argument proceeds in two steps. First, I summarize a decades-long debate over journalists’ powers
of interpretation that would make discussion of the New Journalism meaningful (and contentious).
Although the concept of objectivity figured importantly in that debate, it was not its singular focus.
Journalists themselves were among the first to express reservations about the meaning of objectivity in
news reporting. American reporters, editors, and publishers recognized the intellectual and ethical
complexity of their work during a moment of profound social change and political conflict. Journalists
deployed the term interpretation to figure out where they stood in relation to Communism, civil rights,
feminism, Vietnam, rebellious youth, and the sexual revolution; to affirm the cultural authority of the
narratives they were creating; and to justify the daily newspaper’s continuing importance in a media
marketplace being reconfigured by television, special interest magazines, and paperback books.
Second, I explore the ways in which the New Journalism came to shape this ongoing discussion of
journalists’ habits of interpretation. My approach focuses upon the organizational practices that
connected writers, editors, and publications rather than on the free-floating zeitgeist of that tortured
era. Eason has beautifully captured the angst one finds in the writings of Mailer, Didion, and Hunter
Thompson, and described how their grasp of that age’s anxiety encouraged ambiguity, uncertainty, and
hesitance in their narratives. By contrast, he argues, writers such as Tom Wolfe and Gay Talese seemed
more at ease with their judgments of reality, and believed that in-depth reporting could adequately
capture Americans’ experience. I want to argue that social and political unrest created a market
opportunity for both writers and publications. The writers who came to be described as New Journalists
styled themselves as interpreters of large social trends (and that was true across both groups of writers
Eason analyzed), and magazines like Esquire, Harper’s, and New York sought the work of those writers in
order to create an identity that would appeal to educated, upscale readers. The ethical challenges of
doing literary journalism thus emerge not only from the intrinsic difficulties of the work itself – writers
negotiating the delicate relations between subjects, stories, and truth – but from the moral claims made
on its behalf. How did writers, editors, and publications explain what they were up to, and why it
mattered?