What is New Journalism?

The other day, I was asked, “What is new journalism?” To many of us, who graduated from college before the mid-1990s, new journalism is as foreign a term as creative nonfiction. New journalism is a subtype of creative nonfiction. New journalists still answer the questions of “who,” “what, “where,” “when,” “how,” and “why,” but they also tell their reactions to the events.

New journalists often actively insert themselves into the action they write about. For instance, a new journalist might not only report on a protestor setting himself on fire, but may have also tried to put the fire out—may have been involved in saving the person’s life. We may be told “By noon the temperature had climbed into the high-90s and the trees were still” right before the protest. What we’ll definitely hear about is how the journalist processed the event(s). The books of Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and Mark Bowden, Black Hawk Down, are examples of new journalism.