History of Journalism

Most people have picked up a novel and wondered where the author was in order to get that information. There are some great authors that actually went out and experienced it, and there others that have a really great imagination,and then there are the other people that wrote about it, and thought it was a great idea and embellished on what they read. There are authors that decided to write an Autobiography of themselves: how they wanted to be, how they use to be, and how they were all wrapped up in the characters of the novel. This little trick is what F. Scott Fitzgerald used in the unbelievable novel The Great Gatsby. These are novels, what about journalism? There's a lot allowed in Fiction that isn't allowed in journalism. So what is journalism, and what isn't?

A journalist should be a nonthinking fly on the wall, They should be a recorder who can watch, present the exact information that happened, give both sides, and have no opinion either way. This is true journalism, and this why they have always said that a journalist is blind to the truth, he only knows the fact that is presented. The reader must decided what is the truth and what is not. In the 20's, yellow Journalism came about. Yellow Journalism was the illegal practice of sensationalism and lying in order to sell papers. Facts didn't matter and creativity and selling papers was the only important thing. This was quickly stopped after William Hearst, the great Newspaper Tycoon was stopped.

In the early 60's Truman Capote came up with a new way to write non-fiction. Journalism and journalist have never been the same since. He came up with the idea that you could write creatively, just as long as you kept the facts. It became known as Creative Nonfiction, and has been alive ever since. The reporter takes down all facts to the utmost detail. He find out the who, the when, the where, the why, the what, and even the how. When he has every piece of fact, every piece of memory that he can scrape up. his job starts. He will now put the piece together in such a fashion that it reads like a story. The narrator tells the tale, or if the reporter has enough information, he tells the tale through the eyes of the person themselves. In this way, the tale is completely true and you the reader live through it. A perfect example of this type of journalism and story telling is Truman Capote's book In Cold Blood about the death of a family in Texas. This type of journalsim has become the normal way of writing a story these days.

The last literary journalistic movement was Gonzo journalism. this was created by hunter S. Thompson and takes the reporter inside of thew story, Hunter has been the only one to truly perfect this, unless you want to add in names such as Carl Hiassen. Carl uses information he has written articles about, and creates fabricated semi-true events around them. the problem with Hiasseen, is that the events are not true therefore only the stringed together facts are. Almost as an archetype is not a real person, but a general way a person is.