I wasn’t interested in the long view just then. I didn’t know what history, if any, lay behind it. At the time, the mid-Sixties, one was aware only that all of a sudden there was some sort of artistic excitement in journalism, and that was a new thing in itself. Nevertheless, the New Journalism was the term that caught on eventually. The garbage barge of history is already full of them: the New Humanism, the New Poetry, the New Criticism, the New Conservativism, the New Frontier, il Stilo Novo. Any movement, group, party, program, philosophy or theory that goes under a name with “New” in it is just begging for trouble. To tell the truth, I’ve never even liked the term. It was late in 1966 when you first started hearing people talk about “the New Journalism” in conversation, as best I can remember. Seymour Krim tells me that he first heard it used in 1965 when he was editor of Nugget and Pete Hamill called him and said he wanted to write an article called “The New Journalism” about people like Jimmy Breslin and Gay Talese. I have no idea who coined the term “the New Journalism” or even when it was coined.
This article originally appeared in the December 1972 issue of Esquire.
