What is "new journalism"

New Journalism is a style of news writing and journalism, developed in the 1960s and '70s, which used literary techniques deemed unconventional at the time. It is characterized by a subjective perspective, a literary style reminiscent of long-form non-fiction and emphasizing "truth" over "facts," and intensive reportage in which reporters immersed themselves in the stories as they reported and wrote them. This was in contrast to traditional journalism where the journalist was typically "invisible" and facts are reported as objectively as possible. The phenomenon of New Journalism is generally considered to have ended by the early 1980s.

The term was codified with its current meaning by Tom Wolfe in a 1973 collection of journalism articles he published as The New Journalism, which included works by himself, Truman Capote, Hunter S. Thompson, Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, Terry Southern, Robert Christgau, Gay Talese and others.

Articles in the New Journalism style tended not to be found in newspapers, but rather in magazines such as The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, CoEvolution Quarterly, Esquire, New York, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, and for a short while in the early 1970s, Scanlan's Monthly.

Contemporary journalists and writers questioned the "newness" of New Journalism, as well as whether it qualified as a distinct genre. The subjective nature of the New Journalism received extensive exploration; one critic suggested the genre's practitioners were functioning more as sociologists or psychoanalysts, than as journalists. Criticism has been leveled at numerous individual writers in the genre, as well.