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Popular Culture Review
subjects, it is possible, through interviews, by asking the right question at the
right time, to learn and to report what goes on within other people’s minds.”10
Tom Wolfe, one of the innovators of the New Journalism genre, points
out that the reporter chronicling the societal turmoil of the Sixties could not
successfully fulfill his journalistic obligations by observing reality from the
grandstands. Instead, Wolfe encourages reporters to wade into the swamp of
everyday contemporary life, where reporting can be “tedious, messy, physically
dirty, boring, dangerous even.”11 He adds:
The reporter starts out by presuming upon someone’s privacy,
asking questions he has no right to expect an answer to—and
no sooner has he lowered himself that far than already he has
become a supplicant with his cup out, waiting for information
or something to happen, hoping to be tolerated long enough to
get what he needs, adapting his personality to the situation,
being ingratiating, obliging, charming, whatever seems to be
called for, enduring taunts, abuse, even the occasional
roughing up in the eternal eagerness for "the story”—behavior
that comes close to being servile or even beggarly.12
Wolfe is calling for a comprehensive reporting style that enables a
journalist to portray scenes, extensive dialogue, status life, and emotional life, in
addition to the usual data of the essay-narrative.13 He places special emphasis on
the New Journalist's ability to capture scenes of social reality. Whereas the
information compiled is of primary concern in conventional journalism, it
becomes of secondary importance in New Journalism.14 More precisely, Wolfe
says the New Journalist’s main problem is “managing to stay with whomever
you are writing about long enough for the scenes to take place before your own
eyes/’15 Accomplishing this task is not so much a matter of mastering certain
rules or craft secrets, as it is a test of the reporter’s personality. Wolfe asserts:
Reporting never becomes any easier simply because you have
done it many times. The initial problem is always to approach
total strangers, move in on their lives in some fashion, ask
questions you have no right to expect answers to, ask to see
things you weren’t meant to see.16
Along with utilizing novelistic techniques, capturing the scenes of
everyday life, examining the psyches of real-life characters, and employing
saturation reporting to chronicle societal nuances, the New Journalist also calls
upon ego to accomplish the journalistic task. Wolfe contends that a writer needs
enough ego to believe that what he is doing as a writer is as important as what
anyone he is writing about is doing. He notes that adding ego into the New
Journalism equation prevents the reporter from compromising his own work.
Wolfe adds, “If he doesn’t believe that his own writing is one of the most