The New Journalism at 50

Half a century on from its publication, Killian Faith-Kelly and Dani Clarke talk to British journalists about the legacy of Tom Wolfe’s seminal anthology

Tom Lamont has written 3,000 words on George Clooney, 3,500 on Harry Styles and 6,000 on a butcher in Derbyshire called Frank. Common among all of them are a few things not so common in British feature journalism. Length, for one, but also a fair for idiosyncratic lyricism and wit. Ultimately, a style.

That’s what he says he learned from The New Journalism. The work within the 1973 anthology was defned by its author as united by a use of scenes, symbolic detail, thirdperson narratives and passages of dialogue. Reading it, Lamont suddenly felt “that there didn’t have to be this great boundary between the techniques of fction and narrative nonfction. That each could borrow from the other. And that a good piece of nonfction could contain all of the fgurative writing, the theme-building, the character dynamics that you might expect to fnd in fction.”

Such things frst came his way on the Christmas break of his master’s at City, which he spent on Guy Dimond’s food desk at Time Out. Dimond printed out and instructed Lamont to read something that mesmerised and baffed him, with “the way it kept going on, and deeper, and on, and deeper” inconsistently from the British journalistic diet he’d consisted on thus far. It was a piece from The Atlantic about a wine critic, and what it was doing, Lamont now realises, had a name – longform journalism.

Soon after that, Simon Kurs – now commercial editor at the Evening Standard, at the time a student alongside Tom – made a throwaway joke. It referenced Gay Talese’s “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” , the seminal piece that appeared in a 1966 edition of Esquire, and changed celebrity profle writing forever.

After nodding along knowingly without a clue what Kurs was talking about, Lamont rushed off to read the piece and thought: “Oh hell yeah. If that can be journalism, I wanna do that part. I wanna play on that team.” It’s not an uncommon reaction to the piece. “He created a genre there,” says Lamont, “and God bless him for it, because

I’ve worked in that genre and I’ve loved that genre and I’ve read an awful lot of it.”

The word that keeps coming up when Lamont describes what he got – what he gets (there’s a Talese collection in his hand as we speak) – from reading Talese is permission. “You realise that experimentation is allowed, line blurring is allowed –- different tenses, different points of view, multiple points of view.”

After taking this permission and running with it, quite successfully, for a few years, Lamont found himself on assignment in New York and decided he’d send his hero a message. See if he’d be up for a chat. What’s the worst that could happen?

Well, he’ll never know, because the worst didn’t happen. They met at Talese’s offce, then went back to his fat, and in the hours they spent there Lamont saw several other writers being mentored by the great legend drop in and out. He was thrilled.

He also saw a peculiar collection of pages pinned to a noticeboard on the wall. The reason, of course, was that Talese’s latest way of getting a fresh perspective on his copy was to read it through binoculars from the other side of the room.

Lamont says he came away from that day with a sense of someone who really, really wants to tell the story as visually and as novelistically as he can.

“I’ve always tried to write in a way that’s more colourful and zingy than news prose,” he says. “The novelistic fourishes in other people’s work never irritate me or strike me as extraneous – I love them. A lot of editors think of it as writerly self-indulgence, and they probably have a point, but it’s all taste, isn’t it? It’s what your tolerance for it is.

I’m totally comfortable with my nonfction tasting of fction sometimes.”

Lamont is keen to stress, however, that anything published as journalism must retain that small but rather fundamental quality of actually being true –- and this isn’t a standard the New Journalists always met.

Oli Franklin-Wallis, features editor at GQ, recognises as much of one of his writing heroes, Michael Herr. Herr’s Vietnam wardefning Dispatches, excerpted in The New Journalism, was largely true, but not entirely –- he later said that the work shouldn’t be considered journalism because he’d invented some of the characters as composites of various people he met during his reporting. What Franklin-Wallis took from reading Dispatches though, was not its reporting, but its voice. “This is what journalism can sound like. It doesn’t quite sound like anything being published today,” he says. “It has a lyricism and a confdence and a combative energy all of its own.”

He shares Lamont’s adoration for the “literary sensibility” of New Journalism. In Herr’s case specifcally, he thinks the extreme drama of war may have “prompted New Journalists to try everything on the page, in order to get it across.”

“The way they would treat characters as three-dimensional human beings, with wants and needs and emotions. If you compare what someone like Herr was writing in Dispatches or John Hersey in Hiroshima with what newspapers were producing at the time, they are wildly different. It’s just deeply human. It makes you feel the experience of being there. There’s visceral honesty to it that, I think, really resonates with people.”

It’s a willingness to take risks that FranklinWallis thinks is lacking in contemporary British journalism. Partly he attributes that to an editorial prioritisation of trend-chasing over investment in good writing. But the more “buttoned-up sensibility” of British journalism and culture more broadly has a role to play too, he believes.

Freelance journalist and co-host of the Always Take Notes podcast, Simon Akam, agrees. He is a Brit who primarily works in the UK but who went to journalism school in the US, and attributes the relative success of longform journalism there to the fact that “Americans dare to take themselves seriously and try really hard.” Brits are more adverse to admissions of effort, which Akam thinks limits their willingness to engage in the “stylistic pyrotechnics” of New Journalism.

This is despite the journalistic essay actually being an arguably British tradition that owes as much to Dickens and Orwell as The New Yorker. So how do we get it back? There is some cause for hope –- the Guardian Long Read and 1843 are giving longform writing a chance in the UK, and with some more steps in their direction, who knows? What aspiring longform writers can do to make this happen, Akam says, is “to decide that you really want to have a go at this. And then you have to give yourself permission to really have that go at it. Because it’s hard, but it’s not impossible.”

As for the editing side, Franklin-Wallis would like to see “a universal commitment to the very simple but timeless premise that really good writing and really good reporting is what people come to magazines and newspapers for, and that they don’t come for algorithm-chasing or search queries.”

Kat Lister is a freelance longform journalist preoccupied with many of the same aspects of New Journalism that draw Lamont and Franklin-Wallis to the genre –the detail, the storytelling, and the innovative style. But for Lister, one writer in Tom Wolfe’s seminal collection stands out. A writer who, like Lister, is acclaimed for her immersive memoir writing: Joan Didion.

Like Didion, Lister is sometimes confned by the misconception that writing about herself is all she can do. “People talk about my writing as though I bash out a memoir every week, but I don’t,” says Lister. “It has to be very particular, it’s never just about something that happened to me.”

Beginning her career on the news desk of the male-dominated NME, Lister felt a kinship with Didion, one of the only female journalists in Wolfe’s book. “I was one of the few women in that offce,” Lister says. “I wasn’t given a lot of opportunities and I didn’t have the confdence to just break the door down. So I didn’t. And I ended up not writing for many years after that.”

Lister’s frst memoir came about as a result of tragic circumstances. When her husband passed away in 2018, she started writing in what she calls a “radically different way”.

Writing about grief was what drew Lister closer to Didion. “I read The Year of Magical Thinking and I was incredibly inspired by how she was able to report on the front lines of her grief,” she says. “Her personality is all over that book but she’s not actually in it. I’m still trying to fgure out how the hell she did that.” mindsets are different ... more widescreen,” she says. “Short form is so restrictive. Even the most professional UK writers have this beautiful rhythm and then the piece abruptly ends because they’ve run out of words.”

Although she had read The New Journalism collection prior to this, she felt a barrier between herself and most of the writers. “I didn’t see my identity refected in the authors that were celebrated,” says Lister. “It’s stark to me that it’s such a machismo area.” Lister suggests there were likely many more women than Didion at the time doing the same thing, but they weren’t heralded in the same way.

Lister says: “What I take from Didion is her gaze. Her very uncompromising, direct gaze. She’s got this fne scalpel and every word counts. I wouldn’t say I’m at that level. But that sharpness, that’s what I hope to achieve in my writing.” in their car’. I’m just thinking, I couldn’t do that,” she says. “But I read something Didion wrote about how it can be useful to seem less intimidating and shy even, because people being off their guard is actually a good thing.”

“I think there are some phenomenal examples of New Journalism,” Lister says. “I also think there are some not so great examples. Writers had so much time and space to write a single piece back then, which allowed them to get all those textures and colours and nuggets of observation. We’ve lost that in this country, which is incredibly sad. But, on the fipside, there was so much freedom that at times some of those pieces could do with a bit more editing.”

Longform journalism is less popular in the UK than the US, according to Lister, and it’s also not paid as well as it should be: “I think there’s more space for longform in the US because the landscape is different, so their

For Imogen West-Knights, an awardwinning freelance journalist, the way to get into longform writing is to make yourself “indispensable to the story”. With her unusual life experiences and niche portfolio, she is an avid follower of her own advice. Directing a production of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in a Beijing high school, and living in Sweden were the events that inspired her frst two longform features.

Things really got going, though, when West-Knights wrote a long read for The Guardian about the unsolved murder of the Swedish prime minister, a piece she secured because of her hyper-specifc knowledge and crime reporting contacts in Sweden.

But despite many changes in journalism since the 1960s, longform is still a bit of a “boys’ club”, according to West-Knights. It’s no wonder then that, like Lister, she identifes Didion as the New Journalist who inspires her work the most. “It’s her tone. She’s not trying to make you laugh, it’s more like sharing a smile across a table about something someone else is saying,” she says. “Also she’s a woman. I’ve found it interesting being a woman trying to do indepth reporting because people respond to you differently, especially if you’re young. I look young and I always have.”

She does. With her tomboyish hair and freckles, it’s not hard to imagine the kind of responses West-Knights might elicit when she goes poking around for stories about high profle Swedish crimes.

“I always get a bit jealous when I hear about male friends who do this work, being like, ‘I was in a bar in Lebanon and some guys invited me to a party and we all got

“There are great female longform journalists out there, but the people held up as heroes of the form do tend to be men,” she continues. “Lots of longform is being able to follow your nose. As a woman, you have to follow your nose with the caveat of, ‘Don’t get murdered’.”

Another limitation West-Knights witnesses parallels Lister’s reasoning. “The amount of time it takes costs money. In the US, they have more money to put behind it than here,” says West-Knights. “There’s also a sh*tty culture of press access. You’re expected to do a 45-minute phoner and then write an interesting profle of a celebrity. In the US, they sometimes spend weeks with the person they’re profling. It’s why more and more UK journalists are working over there now.” It’s also why West-Knights herself increasingly writes for publications like The New York Times and Slate

“What I like about longform, and New Journalism, is the level of detail,” she says. “It’s what brings Didion’s pieces alive – the particular food on a train, the colour of the curtains, the way the light is hitting something at a particular moment.”

West-Knights says she’s most interested in what obsesses people. “A friend of mine described my job recently as a ‘weird vibes correspondent’.” When someone is doing something that seems unusual to other people, she likes to investigate what drives them to do that. “‘Why are people so f*cking weird?’ That’s the question I’m trying to answer, but not in a ‘look at these freaks’ kind of way.” She approaches her subjects, even the most superfcially bizarre, with empathy.

“I’m not interested in topics, I’m more interested in telling stories,” she says. Perhaps unconsciously, her fnal phrase is evocative of the opening line of Didion’s iconic essay, ‘The White Album’. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”

Lynsey Hooper is a sports presenter and broadcaster with over 15 years of television and radio experience. She’s worked as a reporter for Sky Sports Women’s Super League coverage, presented for BBC, ITV, BT Sport and ESPN, as well as reporting on two Olympic Games, four World Cups, and a European Championship.

If that wasn’t enough to convince you that Hooper is an expert in the sports media industry, she’s also the co-founder and host of The Offside Rule, an award-winning football podcast that has forged a unique path for women in sports journalism. Hooper spoke to XCity about what it’s like to be a woman in sports journalism in 2023.

Have you always loved football?

“I grew up in the West Midlands in a very working class background. It’s been my bread and butter growing up. I did have a footballobsessed grandfather and uncle, so I think that rubbed off on me. Very early on, I had the option of doing the weekly shop and going to Sainsbury’s with my mum or dad, or sitting with my grandad, and writing down all the football scores for him – and that’s what I wanted to do.”

How did people react to your love of football when you were growing up?

“I used to go to a pub with my friend to watch football all the time.