The Power & The Pitfalls of Literary Journalism

Literary journalism refers to a style of news reporting that involves "deeply researched, well-written pieces that use the techniques of fiction to fully engage the reader's mind and emotions".

Ellie's Seminar F presentation covered Ricketson's chapter in Tapsall & Varley

She, as Ricketson did, explained that although literary journalism is based on fact: real events, real people and their real words; it is creative and emotive.

Articles written in this style are made to move the reader, not just inform them.

The pressures placed on the modern journalist make literary journalism difficult to fully harness.

As Ellie and Ricketson noted, this style requires much more time and resources to complete than standard inverted pyramid style reporting of everyday news.

Literary journalism pieces are more likely to be found in magazines or written as novels due to the massive word count often required to tell such a story.

Ellie used a piece written about a convoy of US troops in Afghanistan by a journalist as an example.

Lots of adjectives and imagery are built in to the article to try to connect with the reader and their emotions.

As Ellie and Ricketson point out, many literary journalism pieces are written in the first person.

This is mainly due to the personal journey many journalists would have to go on to research for a literary journalism piece.

They must fully submerge themselves in the story to be able to make a reader do the same.

The criticism of literary journalism is its credibility.

As Ellie raised, is literary journalism in any way less credible than traditional “factual” journalism?

I think that although there is always a certain (minimal) level of subjectivity in conventional, mainstream news reportage, the line between literary journalism and opinion pieces or semi-fictional novels begins to get fairly hazy.

It is important for journalists to perform this investigative style of research wherever possible but the desire of the literary journalist to tug at the heartstrings, i think, presents a challenge to the credibility of this style.

It is more than just the 'facts' of the story.

'Facts' can be subjective depending on the individual journalist's perspective, but literary journalism involves fleshing out that perspective and pushing the reader to take a side and feel an emotion.

I think this style is a fairly tenuous strand of journalism: I think it belongs in the creative writing basket.

But that said, what is journalism?

Definitively, we just can't say.