When News Became Literature: The Tumultuous Ascent of Narrative Journalism in the Twentieth Century

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, a sea change occurred in the world of journalism, opening new space for narrative forms of expression in the periodical press. Thomas R. Schmidt's Rewriting the Newspaper: The Storytelling Movement in American Print Journalism and Kevin M. Lerner's Provoking the Press: (MORE) Magazine and the Crisis of Confidence in American Journalism, both published in 2019 by the University of Missouri Press for the series Journalism in Perspective: Continuities and Disruptions (edited by Tim P. Vos), address the movement against traditional hard-news methods constrained by the ideal of reportorial objectivity, the five W's (who, what, when, where, and why), and inverted pyramid form. Innovative, college-educated editors and reporters reached beyond these templates for more expressive modes to cover the era's roiling counterculture, anti-war protests, women's movement, and civil rights activism. Hard news and its "empire of facts" no longer reigned supreme over the "garden of imagination," as the two realms increasingly coalesced in narrative journalism (Schmidt 75).

Journalism histories often account for this shift by focusing on the era's acclaimed magazine writers Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, and Joan Didion, whose well-crafted reportage attracted lucrative book contracts. This approach typically treats the migration of high-profile novelists such as Norman Mailer and Truman Capote into creative nonfiction and longform journalism. Rewriting the Newspaper and Provoking the Press instead forge new ground, providing rich, historically specific perspectives on how the institutions of journalism—its publications, writers, editors, and publishers—shaped the narrative movement associated with the New Journalism. These books provide ample evidence that the movement was much larger and more diffusely situated throughout the industry than presumed, extending well beyond Tom Wolfe's circle to revolutionize the content and discourse surrounding late twentieth-century American periodicals.

The crisis of confidence in American journalism during the 1970s examined in Lerner's Provoking the Press was a major catalyst for the storytelling movement explored in Schmidt's book, which emphasizes the shifting praxis evident in the era's newsrooms and trade journals. Taken together, they function as apt companion pieces for understanding how the period's most respected press critics set the stage for the discursive, institutional, and cultural shifts that sparked the rise of narrative journalism. Lerner shows how the prospect of articulating the nuances of the cultural revolution through staid, distanced reportorial techniques struck two young college-educated journalists, one from Newsweek and the other the New York Times, as absurd, prompting them to launch (MORE): A Journalism Review in 1970. The magazine is a forgotten yet historically significant source that featured satirical and serious criticism targeting conventional coverage of major events such as Watergate, the rise of public broadcasting, the presence of women on newsroom staffs, and the entrance of media mogul Rupert Murdoch into the industry. (MORE) functioned as a clearinghouse for commentary about the press, much of it unconventional, by the period's most important figures in the world of American journalism. At stake in the crisis of confidence in press coverage of these transformational events was the future of journalism itself.

Through spare, crystalline prose, Schmidt unearths the concerted editorial measures aimed at training news staffs to utilize literary techniques such as scene setting, characterization, and tension building more commonly associated with fiction. Unlike Provoking the Press's focus on one magazine's impact on the debate, Rewriting the Newspaper captures this narrative turn over the course of three decades in the least likely of places—the daily newspaper. Considering the financial pressures and temporal constraints of the daily news cycle, it may seem surprising to many media scholars and literary critics that perhaps the least literary of writing industries played a major role in advancing narrative journalism...