Overview

Between the 1970s and the 1990s American journalists began telling the news by telling stories. They borrowed narrative techniques, transforming sources into characters, events into plots, and their own work from stenography to anthropology. This was more than a change in style. It was a change in substance, a paradigmatic shift in terms of what constituted news and how it was being told. It was a turn toward narrative journalism and a new culture of news, propelled by the storytelling movement. Thomas Schmidt analyzes the expansion of narrative journalism and the corresponding institutional changes in the American newspaper industry in the last quarter of the twentieth century. In doing so, he offers the first institutionally situated history of narrative journalism's evolution from the New Journalism of the 1960s to long-form literary journalism in the 1990s. Based on the analysis of primary sources, industry publications, and oral history interviews, this study traces how narrative techniques developed and spread through newsrooms, advanced by institutional initiatives and a growing network of practitioners, proponents, and writing coaches who mainstreamed the use of storytelling. Challenging the popular belief that it was only a few talented New York reporters (Tome Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin, Gay Talese, Joan Didion, and others) who revolutionized journalism by deciding to employ storytelling techniques in their writing, Schmidt shows that the evolution of narrative in late twentieth century American Journalism was more nuanced, more purposeful, and more institutionally based than the New Journalism myth suggests.

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Reviews

Thanks to Thomas Schmidt, scholars will now have a substantive, institutional sense of how, starting in the 1970s, newspaper editors, reporters, and trade leaders--and soon, in-house writing coaches--developed a community of practice around the turn to long-form storytelling. Grounded in fresh archival research, sifting through often-overlooked trade commentary, and incorporating over two dozen interviews with key players, Schmidt's deftly nuanced cultural-institutional approach complements and challenges stand-alone histories of the New Journalism, as well as studies that either overlook the storytelling turn or would reduce it to economic factors. Rewriting the Newspaper is itself a book with a very important story to tell, and one that is still with us. --Christopher P. Wilson, Boston College, author of Reading Narrative Journalism: An Introduction for Students Offers a detailed, rich, and fascinating account of the narrative journalism movement from the Washington Post to the St. Petersburg Times to the Oregonian and beyond. No one else has done this and Thomas Schmidt has done it with deep research and strong writing himself. --Michael Schudson, Columbia University, author of The Sociology of News and Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers In Rewriting the Newspaper, author Thomas Schmidt gets it right. This is the story of a generation of creative reporters, editors, and teachers, journalists who understood that while reports were central to their craft, they were incapable of fully communicating the truths behind the facts. --Roy Peter Clark, Poynter Institute for Media Studies, author of Writing Tools

Author Information

Thomas R. Schmidt is an assistant professor of Critical Journalism Studies at the University of California, San Diego.

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