Author: Zhuang Yongzhi (Associate Professor at the School of Journalism and Communication, Nanjing University, former editor-in-chief of "Focus Interview")
Source: "Young Reporters" Issue 24, 2023
Introduction:
Among the journalists and students I have come into contact with in the past ten years, There are always people who think that “non-fiction” is of higher quality than journalism.
"What I write is not news, it is non-fiction!" There are always students who remind me; "What I write is not news, it is literary non-fiction!" There are always reporters who declare this. In the past ten years, I have always encountered such moments of rectification.
Is this learning from Hemingway? Reading "Taking Journalism Seriously: News and the Academy" by Barbie Zelizer, translated and published in 2022, I saw in the first chapter that "news is most appreciated when it becomes a non-news phenomenon. When Ernest Hemingway was working as a reporter for the Kansas City Star, Toronto Star and other newspapers in the 1920s, his journalistic experience was viewed as served as an 'apprenticeship' to his later work, which at the time was dismissed as 'mere journalism'. But when he turned some of the same material verbatim into a work of fiction, it was hailed as literature." Zelizer also wrote in the notes based on Hemingway's letters: "Hemingway himself despised his journalistic career and was always worried that it would destroy his creativity. He was very angry when others compared his news reports with his novels. .” Translator Li Qingli also said in the preface: “As a former journalist-turned-scholar, Zelizer observed: News has always had a humble status in the cultural field, and it is most important when it becomes a non-news phenomenon. People appreciate it."
As two scholars at the University of Copenhagen (Jacob Ørmen) and Andreas Lindegaard Gregersen (andreas lindegaard Gregersen) As said, drawing on literary narrative techniques to describe real-life characters and events has long become another tradition in the journalism world in addition to focusing on the amount of information. Narrative journalism has become a unique news genre, which is known by various names, such as narrative journalism (neveu, 2014), literary journalism (sims, 2007), new journalism (johnston & graham, 2012) or slow journalism (le masurier, 2015) etc. There seems to be no general consensus on the boundaries between these types of journalism, but they all sit alongside more traditional forms of news reporting.
Coincidentally, Lee Gutkind, who founded the magazine "Creative Nonfiction", wrote in a new book to be published by Yale University Press in 2024: "Nonfiction itself plays an important role in literature. nonfiction itself has had a bad rap in the literary world. for a long time, it was commonly believed that writing nonfiction was generally inferior to the writing of poetry and fiction), and he also said that "adding the word 'creative' to nonfiction was controversial at first, but it gradually reversed the idea that nonfiction was to some extent inferior The addition of the word “creative” to nonfiction was at first controversial, but it gradually reversed the belief that nonfiction was somehow second class, a cut below poetry and fiction. Some people claim that Gutkind taught a course called "Creative Nonfiction" at the University of Pittsburgh as early as 1973, but he does not believe that he invented the term.
Judging from the above chains of disdain that are not imaginary, whether it is journalism or literature, as a category, genre cannot simply be understood as a conventional classification of identifiable texts or discursive practices. Free University of Brussels (vrije Jelle Mast, assistant professor at the University of Brussels, emphasizes that genre is defined as a purposeful communicative event that socially embeds a specific discourse community and is enabled by the support of available media (technology), while providing entry points into broader group identities, sociocultural belief systems, and normative political ideals or epistemologies.
When I was working as a reporter, I discovered that some of my colleagues thought they were “angels of documentaries” and were forced to do TV news for a while. I also found that some of my colleagues thought they were “angels of literature” and fell into the news world and became reporters. "Non-fiction" has become more and more popular in the past ten years, and it seems that more and more people are learning from Hemingway.
What is regrettable is that in the journalism department, there are actually students who are obsessed with soft news far more than hard news, and who are obsessed with the literary nature of news far more than the amount of information. For such students, we cannot bear to ask: Why not just go to a liberal arts college?
news has its own news value. When journalists cannot face the news and the news cannot face the present, no matter how much they borrow literary techniques, no matter how much they invoke literature or non-fiction, they will not be able to capture the attention of readers.
Reference format for citations in this article:
Zhuang Yongzhi. Is it called "non-fiction" a higher standard than journalism [j]. Young Journalists, 2023(24):128.
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