Challenging the Boundaries of Journalism and Fiction

As a New York city editor and reporter in the 1890s and early 1900s, the muckraker journalist, Lincoln Steffens, has become well-known for two experiments in newspaper journalism that have been held up by historians as illustrations of the good and the bad that the daily press can contribute to the public weal—and which, by extension, can be seen at the heart of the debate about journalism’s contribution to the literary tradition. Steffens’s first demonstration was to show that a so-called objective newspaper could create a “crime wave” simply by sensationalizing the typical crime stories that show up on the police blotter under big headlines and with fear-stoking editorial commentary. Steffens’s second demonstration was to exhort his reporters to forswear dry, formula-based accounts of the activities of the city and to personalize the stories of common people by writing them in frank but artful language that appealed to both literary savants and the average reader. A particular feature of this kind of writing—that would become the credo of the “new” journalists of the 1960s and 1970s—was to treat journalism as if it had the potential to be literature, and to use narratives in ways that would bond readers with the subjects of newspaper stories and create a natural sympathy for their struggles and difficult circumstances. “Our stated ideal for a murder story was that it should be so understood and told that the murderer would not be hanged, not by our readers,” Steffens wrote of his aim as the city editor of the New York Commercial Advertiser . These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.