Chapter 10: Literary Journalism

If the news media is not screaming urgency at its audience, then it is homogenising and neutering truly tragic or shocking news events. (p149)

Barely an evening goes by without the brief appearance from a grieving relative. Each interview looks so much like the other that it is almost impossible to for viewers to identify with the victims plight.

Alternatively, the most appalling overseas wars scenes are parcelled up in 45seconds and sweetened by a reporter’s dully intoned voiceover.

EFFECT: The general effect of this constant bombarding of images, stories and tragedy is the gradual dehumanising of both subjects of stories and those who read them. We become desensitised to the events taking place around us because it’s as though we’ve seen it all before.

So in a way I think the concept of literary journalism could be a kind of solution to this problem.

- Some commentators have urged journalists to match their power and influence with greater accountability.

- Another group places faith in providing deeply researched, well-written pieces that use the techniques of fiction to fully engage the readers mind and emotions.

And its these techniques which make the style of literary journalism.

ELEMENTS OF LITERARY JOURNALISM:

What is literary journalism?

“In literary journalism the research is the iceberg and the polished prose its tip.“

Elements of:
- Documented subject matter chosen from real world as opposed to ‘invented’ from the writers mind. (156)
- Exhaustive research, either through conventional sources such as documents & interviews, or by ‘saturation’ reporting; that is, by immersing yourself in the world of your subject (Helen Garner) (156-57)
- Novelistic techniques: using a range of techniques borrowed from fiction
a. Creating whole scenes
b. Quoting passages of dialogue
c. Describing the social setting in detail
d. Writing interior monologues for subjects
- Restricted to mostly techniques drawn from socially realistic fiction.
- Voice: daily journalism is tyrannised by industrial voice
- Literary prose style, both in attention paid to structure the narrative and choosing the words themselves.
- Underlying meaning. The purpose of this work is to go beyond the constraints of daily journalism and find the underlying meanings in issues and events.

Primary Aims:
Journalism – to accurate information about a news event.
Fiction – to tell a compelling story.

Literary journalists fuse the role of observer and maker to find a third way of depicting reality. (Sims 1990, p.18)

This usually has two important implications:
1. It broadens the readers understanding of what happened within the event they’re reporting on
2. It has an impact.

How does the reader know the described events are real? I think this is an important question.
Simply they do not, they must trust the writing. Which therefore means the writer must earn the audiences trust.
Yet i'm not sure how this can achieved completely. There are of course ways: such as writers which have been around for a period of time are more established and thus more credible yet i'm not sure how this same kind of trust can achieved for first time literary journalists.


CONCLUSION:

The use of fictional techniques in journalism throws a host of complex and subtle issues.

It requires much more skill than daily journalism, because you need to be careful while creating a voice that you do not write something untrue because it suits the tone. And if you do then the audience needs to be informed accordingly, there is a danger it seems with literary journalism to swing to far either into fact and loose the voice which makes literary journalism so unique or go the other way and change events to something untrue because its what you think the audience may want to hear.

If literary journalism seeks to get at underlying meanings in issues and events, it also makes it far harder for readers to determine what is fact and what is fiction, making it all the more important that its practitioners keep faith with the reader.