{"id":164198,"date":"2025-10-08T20:08:30","date_gmt":"2025-10-09T04:08:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=164198"},"modified":"2025-10-08T07:13:00","modified_gmt":"2025-10-08T15:13:00","slug":"the-new-journalism-relies-on-borrowing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=164198","title":{"rendered":"The New Journalism Relies On Borrowing"},"content":{"rendered":"

Joe Mysak writes<\/a>:<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t know this, and I really don\u2019t know how anyone would, until I read a remarkable pair of “Annotation Tuesday!\u2019\u2019 articles by Elon Green at the Nieman Foundation\u2019s NiemanStoryboard website. The first<\/a> featured Gay Talese about his famous Esquire article, “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,\u2019\u2019 that originally appeared in 2013. The second<\/a> dealt with Tom Wolfe and “Radical Chic\u2019\u2019 in 2014. Both are done in the same format. Green interviews the writers and then they go through the articles and add annotations from his questions.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a very effective and revealing format, and in its way, reading the Talese\/Green annotation is also like watching a boxing match.<\/p>\n

In the Talese annotation, pretty early in the going, Talese says that what\u2019s important is “how you use this stuff,\u2019\u2019 that is, all the material you collect in your reporting. He says, “For example, the famous quote in the Joe DiMaggio piece. Marilyn Monroe, who just performed for troops in Korea, told DiMaggio, `You never heard such cheering.\u2019 `Yes, I have,\u2019 he said. People say, `Oh, Gay, how did you get that? What a great idea.\u2019 I didn\u2019t get that. That quote was published. I lifted it out of a magazine article about Marilyn Monroe that was written by Maurice Zolotow. I just clipped it. I took it out and I stuck it in there, and it took on a meaningfulness, a dimension.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t get that.<\/em> (Italics mine).<\/p>\n

Talese goes on in that tone for a bit. Finally Green says, you didn\u2019t attribute it. And Talese answers, “No, I don\u2019t. I didn\u2019t attribute it because you couldn\u2019t. If I did, the mood would be lost.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n

Much later, Green observes that editors today hold reporters to a different standard, and demand attribution of material that\u2019s not original.<\/p>\n

Talese replies, “if I had said, `Oh, Joe, you never heard such cheering,\u2019 Marilyn said, according to Maurice Zolotow in Glamour magazine, it would kill it.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n

And you can tell that Green isn\u2019t quite buying it. He\u2019s uncovered something here, but he isn\u2019t exactly going to get into a fight with a revered guest in that guest\u2019s own home. Still, he, Green, keeps pushing, and Talese pushes back, eventually saying it\u2019s a matter of form, the uninterrupted voice of the writer. “When you choose not to attribute Zolotow, or these quotes, it is a literary device which predicates the most important thing is form. It\u2019s not as important as fact, but form and fact break the barrier between nonfiction and fiction as a method of communication.\u2019\u2019 He continues, “Writers, whether Philip Roth in fiction or Tom Wolfe or Halberstam or Breslin or John McPhee or me or whoever in nonfiction, the voice is very important. And there are times when you cannot interrupt the voice if you have it. It carries an atmosphere.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n

I guess as a journalist I\u2019d never heard that, that once something\u2019s been published, it\u2019s open season and you can use it as your own, without attribution. Okay, maybe I might think about sneaking in a fact that\u2019s generally known, such as maybe that the signing of the Declaration of Independence occurred on July 4 of 1776, but once it gets to a tasty little morsel that\u2019s been published but perhaps not fully appreciated at the time, as one of the drones of business journalism<\/em>, I would find it impossible to just lift it without acknowledging somehow that someone else found it or wrote it first, and I would say this professional point of view has won out in the intervening years since Esquire published “The Silent Season of a Hero,\u2019\u2019 in 1966. I understand and appreciate the importance of tone, of form. But still.<\/p>\n

Which leads us back to the Lehmann-Haupt review and to his question about Leonard Bernstein\u2019s innermost fantasies. This concerns how Tom both opens and closes “Radical Chic,\u2019\u2019 and a recurring weird little nightmare or vision or thought that Bernstein keeps having at 3 or 4 in the morning. And Tom, in the very first annotation, admits that the entire anecdote is from a book on Bernstein by John Gruen that was published in 1968. And no, Tom doesn\u2019t feel the need to attribute, either.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Joe Mysak writes: I didn\u2019t know this, and I really don\u2019t know how anyone would, until I read a remarkable pair of “Annotation Tuesday!\u2019\u2019 articles by Elon Green at the Nieman Foundation\u2019s NiemanStoryboard website. The first featured Gay Talese about … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-164198","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journalism"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t