Joan Didion and the legacy of New Journalism

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 18/12/2023 (753 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

This upcoming Dec. 23 marks the second anniversary since Joan Didion, award-winning novelist, essayist, and pioneer of New Journalism, passed away. Nevertheless, her art, her thoughts, and her impact on journalism remain.

Joan Didion’s work caught the world’s attention in the late 1960s, but her career started several years prior, in 1956. During her senior year at the University of California, Berkely, Didion won first place in the “Prix de Paris” essay contest sponsored by Vogue. She was awarded a job at Vogue as a promotional copywriter, where she worked for seven years — until 1963, when she finished her Vogue career as an associate feature editor.

In 1968, Didion’s first non-fiction book, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” was published. “Slouching” is a collection of magazine pieces interlacing her shrewd observations of the pervasive counterculture in 1960s America with her personal experiences in California. The collection is a poignant criticism of American society, filled with irony and impressive prose. This remains one of the earliest and most prominent examples of New Journalism. Didion would continue to write piercing novels, and intelligent essays and plays, but the journalism world was forever impacted by “Slouching.”

“Slouching Towards Bethlehem” was an immediate success. It would not officially be categorized as “New Journalism” until a few years later, but that didn’t matter, people knew it was different. New Journalism would later be described as using four literary techniques to differentiate it from traditional journalism: identifying scene, dialogue, point-of-view, and status detail. Slouching used all of them, and she wasn’t alone. A new “group” was forming, a movement, one that would inspire and impact the journalism world in ways that were never seriously considered before.

The writer credited with the beginning of the New Journalism movement, Tom Wolfe, saw it as a way to re-ignite the public’s interest in journalism and the news by using literary techniques that were unconventional in journalism at the time. In the 1960s and ’70s, a group of intelligent writers started using subjective perspective and substantial imagery to immerse themselves in the stories they reported. Pioneers in New Journalism believed it not only to be just as effective as objective journalism, but even more so. The New Journalists were confident in their belief that objectivity did not necessarily guarantee truth and that objective reports could potentially be more misleading than stories told from a clearly stated personal point of view. The profession is very uncompromising, and this new movement challenged it; and it really started to take shape in 1973, when the first official “New Journalism” collection was released by Tom Wolfe titled “The New Journalism,” which featured writing by himself, Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Gay Talese, Joan Didion and more. It offered journalism that read like a novel.

The aforementioned writers succeeded in strengthening people’s interest in journalism, as well as inspiring others to begin working in the field. The Neelin Journalism Team, as well as everyone reading this article, has benefited from the work of Didion and Wolfe, along with every other journalist in some way, whether it be from information or inspiration. There are brave and talented people all over the world right now who are risking their lives to report the news, and whether they do this objectively or subjectively, it shows how important it is to acknowledge the brilliant people who keep the world informed.

» Arden Hebert is a grade eleven student at École secondaire Neelin High School