It’s been a long time now since Watergate gave journalists glamour and fame. There’ve been lots of good stories for sure since then but literary style may be harder to spot on the 24 hour cable TV networks and on the internet.
The craft of narrative journalism survives in the pages of the New Yorker magazine and in some newspapers around the country. And it survives in the old collections of columns by the likes of Murray Kempton and Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe and Lillian Ross who wrote this in the introduction to her 1949 book of pieces called “Reporting:” “Write as clearly and simply and straightforwardly as possible….Hold on to the quietness in your life… Do not go on television to sell yourself or your books to as much of the public as you can reach. ..that’s a betrayal to the force that makes one want to write in the first place.” Celebrating the craft of journalism is this hour on the Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)
Guests:
Mitchell Zukoff, Chip Scanlan, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, Adam Hochschild, Tom French, Ann Hull