A Comparative Analysis of Armies of the Night and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test in Regards to New Journalism

Around the time of the novels publication in the late 1960s, a new literary genre had begun to surface: New Journalism. New Journalism sought to combine the elements of news writing and journalism with the elements of fiction writing. Described as being a form of literature that “engages and excites”, it sought to challenge its readers not only “emotionally” but also “intellectually”. Typically, New Journalism consists of four major characteristics such as

Journalist, Norman Mailer, in his essay, “The Death of Benny Paret”, describes his firsthand account of the beatdown, and ultimate death of the professional boxer. Mailer’s purpose is to integrate a logical, formative description of the events that took place with his emotional reaction to witnessing the profound death of a man who he supported and revered. He adopts an excited tone, which fluctuates throughout the piece and eventually turns somber, and somewhat bitter, in order to both inform and to channel the emotional rollercoaster he experienced on this night to his audience.

Furthermore, In Warshow’s review of E.B White and the New Yorker, experience again is at the forefront of his critique, along with a bit of his ever present political views. He makes a very important point at the begging of this review, “The New Yorker has always dealt with experience not by trying to understand it but by prescribing the attitude to be adopted toward it.” (warshow 2001, 75) This becomes an interesting argument, even today, as we think about what trends we have seen in popular culture. Do we ever ask ourselves if this is something that has been prescribed to us, instead of by us? Journalism, especially from writers of a certain stature, can often dictate where the culture shifts. If we are able to look at the writing with an objective eye then we are simply learning about another facet of the experience. All to often, though, it is hard for us to be objective. This could be why we, as Americans, have popular culture at all. A journalist tells us what is cool, and we subscribe to that idea as an entire culture. There are always outliers, but when talking about popular culture most Americans are in it for the collective effervesces. I think this point would be highly debated by Warshow. As he says at the end of this review, unable to keep his political feelings at bay, “The purpose of this writing is not to say anything about democracy …but only to arouse certain familiar responses in the liberal middle-class reader.” (warshow 2001,78)

In the late sixties a young journalist and free-lance novelist named Hunter S. Thompson (HST) emerged with a new, crazed and exaggerated brand of reporting. It was sooner or later referred to as “Gonzo”. HST’s own definition of gonzo has varied over the years, but he still maintains that a good gonzo journalist “needs the talent of a master journalist, the eye of an artist/photographer and the heavy balls of an actor” and that gonzo is a “style of reporting based on William Faulkner’s idea that the best fiction is far more true than any kind of journalism”(Carroll, page 192). Gonzo journalism has also been referred to as outlaw journalism, new journalism, alternative journalism, literary

Perhaps the craft technique most unique in new journalism is use of an omniscient narrator, albeit a limited one. In few places do we see this boundary pushed harder than in Wolfe’s The Right

The novel is a winner of the highly acclaimed Pulitzer prize which explores the nature of community and belonging, father-daughter relations, Jewish assimilation, political fanaticism, familial loyalty and betrayal. It is a novel which describes the times of the Vietnam War, and its influence on the Americans, especially the Jewish Americans. Roth started writing the novel at the end of the Vietnam War which was one of the shattering national events of his adulthood. Through the novel, Roth discusses the course of American history from the 1940s, the disappointments and horrors of the 1960s, and the devastating effects of a country divided over the Vietnam

Mailer consistently inserts individual sexual habits into the background of each of the main characters in The Naked and the dead with the result juxtaposing the previous sexual experiences of the characters with their violent wartime experiences in order to show common connections amongst the instincts of the men and the emotional psychological reactions to war with an inability for any sexual release. Mailer wrote himself in Advertisements for Myself 1959 “For being a man is the continuing battle of one’s life” the main achievement of masculinity seems to be overwhelmingly a produce of ones heterosexuality, courage and desire for dominance, both sexually and otherwise. The Naked and the Dead presents both an ethnic and class cross-section

In the 1950s and 60s America, a silent alteration engulfed a generation of young reporters and writers which came to be known as New Journalism. Journalism that blended fiction with fact and had the likes of Norman Mailer and Truman Capote committed to its style. Norman Mailer once declared that he "felt that (he) had some dim intuitive feeling that what was wrong with all journalism is that the reporter tended to be objective and that that was one of the great lies of all

Even after forty years, Hunter S. Thompson’s creation of gonzo journalism became a new style of writing that remains imitated. Gonzo journalism has many different characteristics; one of the most predominant is

Atonement’s chief narrative feature is McEwan’s use of an embedded author—Briony Tallis—whose text is nearly coterminous with the novel itself. This technique is of course not a new one: Sterne’s Sentimental Journey and MacKenzie’s Man of Feeling are both framed as the written accounts of their protagonists. McEwan’s trick in Atonement, though, is presumably that we are to be ignorant of the presence of this embedded author until very close to the end of the book. The chief effect of this is that we are forced to retroactively reconsider our epistemological position vis-à-vis the novel’s characters and its events, a

Few living creators understand the appeal of American history as a trove of story material better than Ken Burns, author of long-form documentaries like Jazz, Baseball, and The Civil War, who finds that its “good guys have serious flaws and the villains are very compelling.” And though he ostensibly works with only the facts, he acknowledges that “all story is manipulation,” some of it desirable manipulation and some of it not so much, with the challenge of telling the difference falling to the storyteller themselves.

There are many different types of articles: newspaper articles, journal articles, editorial articles, research articles. Each one of these articles target a different audience. The authors takes into account who will be reading their article and how much knowledge he or she has on the topic being discussed. The style of each of these articles depends on the audience. The comprehensibility of a newspaper article will be much greater than a research journal article written by a scientist. The audience has a large impact on the style, structure, word choice, credibility and understanding of different articles.

Journalists should express their ideologies and opinions while covering poverty, however, at the same time they should aim to maintain the objectivity and impartiality standards for effective and truthful and accurate reporting.

With recent rapid advancements in technology, the majority of Australians now access online news. With the proliferation of fake news sites and hostile online columnists frequently mocking groups of people instead of simply challenging ideas, presenting facts in a neutral way many readers have become disillusioned, no longer being able to recognize whom to trust. As learning journalists and columnists, we need to learn to lift our profession, untie facts from the opinions and maintain fair, inequitable, unbiased ideas and attitudes.

I will get an address for you tomorrow. I've just come back from the main production studios I work for, and a very nice Portuguese electronics/video/compression expert, Paulo, spent a lot of time trying to figure out what we can do with all the footage. Good news is that he can use conversions and compression programmes (he writes them himself) that will allow for all our cellphone pics and videos, your pictures and the camcorder's footage to be used in the same editing programme. So though that's fantastic news, the editing won't be as quick as I'd hoped. He will also "clean up" the sound of that midnight concert, so more of it will be usable.