Observational/ Literary/ Gonzo style journalism

It is important to remember when you are doing features that are this particular style, to keep your comment separate from what you portray to be a fact. In this case it is better for your comment to be aggressive for it to work with this style of journalism. 

The news today is far more gonzo style that it ever has been as it is very much presenter lead with a lot of pieces to camera. In the 19060s and 70s, there was a popular culture in the USA where there was a generational change. Anti-Vietnam, anti-consumerism, feminism, black power and existentialism was an alternative to the society.

Tom Wolfe is a well known journalist who wrote a great piece called 'The Radical Chic'. It was based on his experiences at a dinner party where the 'Black Panthers' were also present. It was held at Leonard Bernstein's penthouse residence on Park Avenue in 1970. It was around 3000 words long and was published in the New York Times magazine.

All factual features are a performance as they are presenter lead. Even chat shows such as 'Jonathon Ross' is in the style of a confessional interview with each of his guests. But it is also present in print versions 'solipsism' such as in the Daily Mail where we see 'I went to…'

Literary Journalism has a shift in the form of narration from digetic to mimetic. A good writer at this genre is John Steinbeck. If your going gonzo you always need a quest of some sort as this keeps the viewer involved. You don't tend to learn much from gonzo journalism as the audience as it is mainly about the experience of that particular person.

It works best if you choose to go into a different situation that you aren't usually used to. Situations that tend to be more boring can actually end up being the ones that make the best pieces to read. You then concentrate on the atmosphere the situation and pick up on little details that you would't usually take note of such as the lighting and the door handles etc. 

Observational Interview is very picture lead such as in the 'Picture Post' magazine in the 30s. It is all about the photography and what it is showing you rather than the text. For example this issue I have chosen is based on Germany and shows a young women we presume to be German enjoying the weather and beautiful scenery that we can see behind her. The front covers of this magazine rarely have lots of text as the focus is on the image.

When you go into particular situations to write about them, it is best to alienate yourself from the familiarity of it all. This will mean that you will write it accurately as you pretend that you know nothing about it. Focus on details such as clothing, colours and the connotations of what things mean. You are merely writing about the descriptions around you not the actual point of you being wherever you are. Before the 1960s/70s there was no new journalism present and literally no photography. Nowadays television is taking over and it has a large impact on journalism particularly in the features area.

Gonzo Journalism is a fun way to show what you have experienced but in a different way. William Burroughs wrote a piece called 'The naked lunch' about the influence of drugs, but is a very good example of this. It is long but it is worth listening to some of it (if you can work out what is being said) to see the description and style that it is written in. It was written so that you can read it from any chapter at any place in the book and still understand it. It builds up a vivid image for the audience so that they can picture what he is experiencing.

There was also a variety of good gonzo style pieces that a programme called TV Nation did in the US. The video below is based on a Health care olympics where they are seeing how efficient and quick the procedure of treatment between hospitals in the US, Canada and Cuba. It is interesting as it has a quest, a competition style to it and has a commentary/opinion chat in studio alongside the video of what is happening. It shows clearly their procedures, treatment and the way that they all work. It includes interviews with doctors from the different hospitals which is also interesting.

One of the best writers is Ryszard Kapuscinski who was around in the communist times in Poland. There was only one foreign correspondent for Poland at this time and he was the one that got the role for it. Not only did this get him out of Poland it allowed him to travel around writing pieces about things he experienced. However none of his work was published in Poland as the Russians were controlling what was written. His work soon was found and published in US magazines such as 'The New Yorker'. Some of his work are perfect examples of observational journalism and contain some great access. It is all written with no comment and really paints a picture of what he was experiencing. Some of his work titles are: Under the Shadow in the Sun, Sha of Shahs, The Emperor and The Soccer War. His work is very detailed and full of description of people, the place, smells and the scenery. It builds up an image in the readers mind of what it is exactly he is witnessing.

Tom Wolfe has rules on what to focus on to make your piece really good. He uses the 19th/20th century realist literature of Zola, Dickens, Orwell and gives us four tools for story telling in the way of 'The New Journalism. 

1. Scene by scene construction- (with jump cuts or punctuation)
2. Phonetic dialogue/ actual speech (wild track)
3. Third person restricted point of view (not 'I see', use 'it is' as it is an unrestricted 3rd person view, in news we clean up the quotes but keep the meaning the same; however in gonzo journalism you write down exactly what the person says. You can even incorporate the way they speak or an accent they have, 'gonna' instead of 'going to'. You should even include parenthesis (…) not to shorten quotes but when someone literally trails off when speaking.
4. Concentration on symbolic 'status life'- subject matter are things such as clothing and the way each person is.