This section compares and contrasts news and feature writing and considers how the transition from one to the other may privilege a subsequent transition to fiction, particularly the short story. It also will examine column writing and New Journalism and their relationship with comment journalism.
Defining a feature story is almost as problematical as trying to define a journalist or journalism. According to Graham and Schwartz, not even professional feature writers can define it much less devise a formula for writing one (1983: 45). They say a feature story varies so much in length, structure and purpose it defies definition: “The only restrictions are that features must be interesting, and they must be true”. Within such generalities one cannot expect to define, or find, any pure form. The feature story is best seen as a generic term encompassing everything from 6000- word New Journalism-type profile of a hip-hop group in Rolling Stone to a 400-word piece in the local paper on pruning rose bushes.
Renders says there has been little research into the origins of different journalistic writing styles (2002). He particularly cites journalism’s literary styles, such as the New Realism of the 1930s. It presented “a stylistic/political point of view that was of incalculable value to the press in the 1930s”. But to properly map a genre such as literary journalism, Renders believes institutional and cultural-historical information as well as form analysis are required. While that is beyond this dissertation’s scope, one can say the feature story has certain tendencies. For instance a human-interest feature is likely to target the entertain function while the news feature commonly seeks to inform and educate. Some features use literary devices to heighten these functions’ effects. While not plotted like a short story they may use circumlocutions in narration, structure and language to heighten themes and characterisation and metaphors to achieve sensory appeal.
Feature writing and news reporting have much in common. In some respects feature writing is an advanced practice, for traditionally a journalist must have reporting experience before writing features. In a similar vein a sub-editor is
presumed to have reported before assessing reporters’ work. Feature writers typically are regarded as having flexible textual skills. Not only can they write a competent news story they also can craft, from any one topic, a number of different kinds of feature stories. Among them are the profile and human-interest, first person, lifestyle and historical narratives. News features can include investigative epics as well as backgrounders foreshadowing coming events, second-day features presenting “day after” portraits of newsworthy issues and analysis-based features examining recent trends (Conley, 2002: 284-9).
It may be helpful to return to Chambers’ assertion that for journalistic authority to be maintained storytellers must be successful in their strategic approach to narratives (1984: 214). He says the narrator, “to earn the authority to narrate in the very act of storytelling, must be a master of certain ‘tactical’ devices that ensure his or her survival as a storyteller”. The fact feature writers have adapted from reporting to feature writing suggests they have “survived” by mastering the tactical devices of both kinds of narrative. If they can do this they will, it is argued, be more likely to adapt to other kinds of writing – including fiction – than those unable or unwilling to adapt to feature writing. Grenville equates creativity with problem solving (Olsson, 2002: 5). Therefore if the “problem” is transferring reportorial and feature-writing skills to fiction, and success is evidence of creativity, journalists-novelists may possess common characteristics that are expressed through storytelling.
Because of its conventions, aims and practices feature writing is often associated with fiction and can be a fertile training ground for it. Numerous scholars and writers have remarked upon connections between the two. This is a commonplace in journalism textbooks (McKay, 2000: 60; Fedler, 2000: 226-8; Leiter et al, 2000: 7, 9; Stepp, 2000: 56; Missouri Group, 1996, 74; Scanlan, 2000: 399; Bell and van Leeuwen, 1994, 37; and Conley, 2002: 282-3). Tom Wolfe and his comments about New Journalism and fiction are often included in these discussions. Wolfe’s observations support key elements of this thesis. More important than writing techniques learned through journalism is the occupation’s traditional expectation that reporters must move away from the desk and into the world to get material and experience through direct observation. According to Wolfe: “Dickens, Dostoyevski, Balzac, Zola, and Sinclair Lewis assumed (Wolfe’s emphasis) that the novelist had to go beyond his personal experience and head out into society as a reporter” (1989: 52).
Having done so as a journalist suggests a journalist-novelist will continue to do so, with corresponding impacts on his or her fiction. This is emblematic of an operational difference between reporting and feature writing. The reporter can frequently get what is needed to write a story via the telephone, computer and documents. The feature writer is usually expected to leave the office, conduct in- person interviews and directly observe people, places and things in action. This speaks to Wolfe’s argument John Irving, Norman Mailer and John Updike have wasted their careers by failing to engage life, nation and moment in time:
Instead of going out into the world … our old lions had withdrawn, retreated, shielding their eyes against the light, and turned inward to such subject matter as their own little crevice, i.e., “the literary world” … (2000: 156)
One need not have been a journalist to “venture out into the light”, as it were. But novelists with journalistic backgrounds are more likely to do so because the occupation requires them to interact with their communities. In this regard it should be emphasised Mailer’s journalism followed from rather than preceded his fiction.
It may be helpful to compare feature writing with other kinds of reporting before examining how it is applicable to fiction. Reporting and feature writing involve information-gathering techniques such as interviews, backgrounding and document retrieval. Both routinely acknowledge news values and the inform-educate-entertain- advocate-investigate functions. However the entertain function occurs more frequently in feature stories. This is because of the importance of holding readers to lengthy pieces and the need to balance “serious” with “light” content in the overall editorial mix. Each approach is subject to values such as accuracy and fairness and to the occupation’s ethical codes. However there are several important differences. Murray puts it this way:
The writer in the newsroom does all the reporter does – and more. The goal is the same: accuracy, clarity, simplicity; but the writing comes earlier in the process because writing reveals information the reporter didn’t know he or she knew and exposes significant patterns of information – meanings – between those pieces of information. Writing is an equal partner in the reporting and writing of a story; writing is thinking. (1995: 18)
Arena agrees journalism, when pragmatically understood, is the “product of an encounter between a thinking mind and its material” (2000: 4). One of its most
important products, he continues, is the “journalist as storyteller”. However, the deadline-haunted processes involved in gathering, analysing, interpreting and transmitting dense data for mass audiences are foreign to what is normally regarded as synonymous with the literary arts. These processes develop and privilege organisational and communication skills. They also help establish work habits, self- confidence and textual discipline and encourage community engagement, discourse and understanding. Furthermore, each of these attributes can be beneficial to someone writing a novel. But they are more readily seen as representing the tools and talents of reporting rather than writing, which draws more on subjectivity and feeling than on objectivity and thinking. Land discusses this in terms of neurological findings related to left brain-right brain functions (1995: 52-3).
Hierarchies within these genres, which contain many textual, thematic and experiential overlaps, can be discovered on the front page of almost any newspaper: news writing takes precedence over the feature form. Compared to reporting, feature writing places greater reliance on a journalist’s ability to “show” a story rather than recounting facts and recording others’ opinions. A reporter focuses on what people say. A feature writer must do this plus create a picture of the setting and context in which it was said. In the process they are mindful of symbolic detail revealing something about the person, place or thing depicted. It “tells” by “showing”. In so doing feature writing involves greater creativity in word play and descriptiveness. These aim to bring people and places alive on the page.
Adam is prominent in distinguishing news and feature writing, and linking the latter with fictive techniques (1993: 34). In particular, he identifies feature writing structures and narration with prose fiction. In his view, the journalistic narrator uses devices common to all storytellers: action, plot, characterisation, causation, myth, causation, metaphor and explanation.
In feature writing more so than in reporting, the writer’s authorial function is made a virtue. Feature writers can be more subjective than reporters. As in fiction, they need not write in “objective” third person or in past tense. Deadlines may be looser. Interviews typically last longer, are conducted in person and may be presented as conversations rather than question and answer sessions. Also, feature writers have more autonomy in selecting topics and crafting individual writing styles. Unlike the news story a feature story’s introductory paragraph is not written in the inverted
pyramid style. Normally it is regarded as one rhetorical entity. This means it can incorporate several paragraphs that set a scene or tell an anecdote to introduce the story’s theme. And while the news story’s last paragraph by definition is least important the feature story aims to conclude by rewarding the reader with a final insight. Whether writing the introduction or closer, the feature writer has much more choice than the reporter (Conley, 2002: 294-8; 303-4).
Feature writers are less likely to be controlled or dominated by “facts” than is the reporter, who is more constrained by public events and the duty to transmit what people say without embellishment. The feature writer can select, position, structure and interpret facts and opinions to enhance narrative strategies. Because of a feature story’s length and complexity, structure is central to the successful feature. It may include chronologies, flashbacks and a series of scenes connected by exposition and backgrounding. The focus structure, for instance, begins with individual’s story. It then broadens into a larger context. The aim is to humanise news by first getting readers interested in an individual. It is a journalistic truism people prefer reading about people rather than “things”. The feature writer uses that preference as a device to draw them into wider issue-based parameters. In the microcosm is the macrocosm. Fiction can adopt the same strategy. Steinbeck took this approach when writing a series of feature stories for the San Francisco News on “Okies” living in squalid labor camps. Wolfe points out Steinbeck used a family he had met as a journalist the basis for the Joads in The Grapes of Wrath (1939):
He conceived of the Joads as types, as specimens, as a cluster of people representing the whole experience of the Okies, and yet Ma Joad and her rebellious son Tom come to life in the pages of The Grapes of Wrath as two of the most compelling individuals in American fiction. Without departing from the Zolaesque naturalism of his approach, Steinbeck manages by book’s end to make Tom the embodiment of the Okies’ will not only to live but to fight back. (2000: 159)
Again, one need not be a journalist to adopt such strategies or to achieve such ends. But the Steinbeck example demonstrates journalistic experience and the themes it addresses can be, and often are, effectively transferred to fiction. The conflict news value and comment and advocacy functions in the Okies’ ordeal are evident in Steinbeck’s approach, which included a trip to Oklahoma (Alexander, 1965: 15).
Because of its length the feature story must quickly justify its existence by highlighting a useful point or function. A reader does not discard a novel after reading the first page because of the expense incurred buying it. But a feature story has no such advantage. Therefore topic choice, the introduction and structure are crucial. Tone is also vital. It is more conversational and reader-friendly than a news story. Description enlivens feature writing but too much of it can slow the pace, testing a reader’s patience. And because paragraphs tend to be longer and grouped by topic or chronology the feature writer must take more care with transitional devices than a reporter, who often can get by with an “however” or simply changing speakers.
New Journalism is related to feature writing but should not be conflated with it. Forms of it arose during the Defoe era, and in the 1890s, 1930s and 1960s in response to cultural and economic pressures. Johnson says New Journalism had three platforms during the 1960s: 1) the underground press; 2) books and essays; and 3) established media willing to accommodate it (1971: xv). New Journalism exercises the occupation’s comment, investigate and entertain functions and aspires to achieve its truth and conflict values. In contrast to news reporting it uses storytelling techniques with polemical intent. In embracing subjectivity New Journalism applies literary devices applicable to fiction to the textual manifestation of direct observation and experience. Although the newness of this approach is in doubt, it pursues “truths” mainstream media are perceived to have ignored or overlooked.
Tebbel sees New Journalism as the original journalistic form (1974: 404). It can be linked to Defoe, who Kerrane says was possibly the first “modern” literary journalist (1997: 17). He credits Defoe’s story on criminal Jonathan Wild as a model for the contemporary crime narrative. Although Defoe applied literary techniques to journalism, it may be equally accurate to say he applied journalism to literature. Various texts have cited New Journalists among the likes of Dr Samuel Johnson (Sims, 1995: 3); William Hazlitt and George Bernard Shaw (Flippen 1974); James Baldwin (Weber 1980); Joseph Addison (Hollowell 1977); and Henry David Thoreau (Lounsberry 1990). Most New Journalism texts name practitioners such as Breslin, Hemingway, Twain, Mailer, Didion, McPhee, Southern, Talese, Wolfe, Mailer, Capote, Hersey, Crane, Orwell and Thompson.
Lasora et al describe how 20th century journalism abandoned its narrative- based storytelling heritage in favour of exposition involving objectified interpretation
and analysis of events (1992: 439). New Journalism eschewed news-writing formats, combining storytelling devices with journalistic tools to explore matters of public interest. Hartsock believes literary journalism was an attempt to re-engage readers’ subjectivity by itself engaging in subjectivity (2000: 246). This speaks to the comment function, which in 2003 was being declared “king” of Australian newspapers (Jackson, 2003: 4).
New Journalism was more prominent in the United States and the United Kingdom than in Australia during the 1960s and 1970s (Birmingham, 2002: 16). However, no critical or comparative studies of this are extant. Although speculative – and arguable – four core reasons for the presumed disparity can be proposed: 1) New Journalism was primarily a magazine-based phenomenon and Australia’s population was too small to support the genre as a niche practice. 2) public passions about the Vietnam War, racial issues and women’s rights that fostered New Journalism in the United States did not seem to reach the same intensity level in Australia; 3) the era’s journalistic ethos decried personalised writing styles – especially use of the “I” word – as ego-based; and 4) unlike in the United States, Australian defamation laws do not have a public figure defence and offer no explicit constitutional right to free speech. This discourages New Journalism in which legal risk parallels confrontationist, anti- authoritarian values. Relevance to the thesis can be claimed if it is accepted such obstacles caused some Australians to abandon journalism for fiction’s freer – and safer – voice, particularly in relation to comment, conflict, gatekeeping and public policy.
In the United States during the 1960s, Tom Wolfe and a few others such as Studs Terkel and Jimmy Breslin began using fictive story-telling devices such as scene-by-scene construction, recording dialogue in full and using symbolic description (Wolfe, 1975: 46-7; 37-8). Wolfe says he did not hear the term New Journalism until 1966: “Really stylish reporting was something no one knew how to deal with since no one was used to thinking of reporting as having an aesthetic dimension” (24). Ricketson believes New Journalism may have had an earlier antecedent in Australia (2001a: 29). He cites a feature story published in Perth’s
Weekend Mail that won the first Walkley award for feature writing in 1956. In
rendered the soldier’s thoughts. Also it was structured and written as if it were a novelistic narrative.
Although Wolfe says New Journalism favours third-person point of view (1975: 46), several of those named above wrote in the essay style of a columnist, i.e. from a personal perspective. The comment journalism that dominated 18th century journalism in some respects became transmuted into the late 19th century sketch. This can be seen in point of view: the writer, in effect, continued to comment on issues from a clearly marked individualistic position. In terms of technique the sketch allowed the writer to be more descriptive and even become an actor in scenes described. But in terms of function the sketch was less likely to embrace advocacy or the conflict news value. Its aim might simply have been to capture “local colour” by showing people how they live, act and think and, in so doing, focussed on the entertainment function. Whether writing in first or third person both the column and the sketch privileged, even demanded, subjectivity.
In the 20th century resemblances to these forms can be found in columns and feature writing. In reviewing Hartsock’s A History of American Literary Journalism (2000), Renders notes the assertion that, a century ago, newspaper writing was much more personal than it is today (2002). According to Renders: “The observation can, however, be tempered if one knows that many of the journalists cited by [Hartsock] were, in the first place, columnists”. Hartsock argues newspaper commentaries can be seen as a type of literary journalism (2000: 11).
Similarities can be identified between techniques used by these early-day columnists and news writers and those of the 1960s that gave birth to New Journalism. Wolfe cites the example of New York Herald Tribune columnist Jimmy Breslin: “… Breslin made a revolutionary discovery. He made the discovery it was