Abstract

After Tom Wolfe discovered in the mid-1960s what he went on to call “The New Journalism,” he described how this innovative mode of reporting had taken form outside the dominant media culture of daily newspapers, emerging instead at periodicals such as New York and Esquire. Articles published in these magazines had marked “the sudden arrival of this new style of journalism, from out of nowhere,” ¹ Wolfe wrote. “All of a sudden there was some sort of artistic excitement in journalism, and that was a new thing in itself.” ² Wolfe was certainly correct about the role of magazines in nurturing a style of journalism that mixed fact-based reporting with the use of a range of literary devices, but he was wrong in arguing that this phenomenon was unprecedented.