Description
Book SynopsisAnalyses the expansion of narrative journalism in the American newspaper industry in the last quarter of the twentieth century. In doing so, the book offers the first institutionally situated history of narrative journalism's evolution from the New Journalism of the 1960s to long-form literary journalism in the 1990s.
Trade Review“Offers a detailed, rich, and fascinating account of the narrative journalism movement from the
Washington Post to the
St. Petersburg Times to the
Oregonian and beyond. No one else has done this and Thomas Schmidt has done it with deep research and strong writing himself.”—Michael Schudson, Columbia University, author of
The Sociology of News and Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers "Thanks to Thomas Schmidt, scholars will now have a substantive, institutional sense of how, starting in the 1970s, newspaper editors, reporters, and trade leaders—and soon, in-house writing coaches—developed a community of practice around the turn to long-form storytelling. Grounded in fresh archival research, sifting through often-overlooked trade commentary, and incorporating over two dozen interviews with key players, Schmidt's deftly nuanced "cultural-institutional" approach complements and challenges stand-alone histories of the "New Journalism," as well as studies that either overlook the storytelling turn or would reduce it to economic factors.
Rewriting the Newspaper is itself a book with a very important story to tell, and one that is still with us."—Christopher P. Wilson, Boston College, author of
Reading Narrative Journalism: An Introduction for Students "In
Rewriting the Newspaper, author Thomas Schmidt gets it right. This is the story of a generation of creative reporters, editors, and teachers, journalists who understood that while reports were central to their craft, they were incapable of fully communicating the truths behind the facts."—Roy Peter Clark, Poynter Institute for Media Studies, author of
Writing Tools
