Is it called "non-fiction" than the style of journalism?

Author:

Zhuang Yongzhi (Associate Professor, School of Journalism and Communication, Nanjing University, former editor-in-chief of Focus Interview)

Source:

Young Journalists, Issue 24, 2023

Introduction: Among the journalists and students I have come into contact with in the last decade or so, there are always those who think that "non-fiction" is more important than journalism.

"I'm not writing news, it's non-fiction!" a student always reminds me, "My work is not journalism, it's literary nonfiction!" In the past ten years, I have always encountered such a moment of righteousness.

Reading Barbie Zelizer's "Taking Journalism Seriously: News and the Academy," translated in 2022, the first chapter shows that "news is most appreciated when it becomes a non-news phenomenon." When Ernest Hemingway was a journalist for the Kansas City Star, Toronto Star, and other newspapers in the '20s, his experience as a journalist was seen as 'apprenticeship' for his later work, which was dismissed as 'just journalism.'" But when he wrote part of the same material verbatim as fiction, it was hailed as literature." Zelizer also wrote in a note based on Hemingway's letters: "Hemingway himself despised his career as a journalist and always feared that it would ruin his creativity, and he was furious when others compared his journalism to his novels." In the preface, translator Li Qingli also said: "As a former journalist-turned-scholar, Zelizer observes that journalism has always been humble in the cultural field, and only 'when it becomes a non-journalistic phenomenon is most appreciated'. ”

As two scholars at the University of Copenhagen, Jacob Ormen and Andreas Lindegaard Gregersen have argued, drawing on literary narratives to portray real-life people and events has long since become an alternative to the informative nature of journalism. Narrative journalism has emerged as a distinct genre of journalism that can be called by a variety of names, such as narrative journalism (Neveu, 2014), literary journalism (Sims, 2007), new journalism (Johnston & Graham, 2012) or slow journalism (Le Masurier, 2015). There doesn't seem to be a general consensus on the boundaries between these types of journalism, but they all juxtapose with more traditional forms of journalism.

巧合的是，创办了《创造性非虚构》杂志（Creative Nonfiction）的李·古特金德（Lee Gutkind）在2024年将由耶鲁大学出版社出版的新书中写道：“非虚构作品本身在文学界名声不好。 很长一段时间以来，人们普遍认为，非虚构作品的写作通常不如诗歌和小说”（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），他还说“把‘创造性’这个词加到非虚构中，一开始是有争议的，但它逐渐扭转了非虚构在某种程度上是二等的观念——比诗歌和小说低一级”（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）。 有人称古特金德早在1973年就在匹兹堡大学教过一门名叫“创造性非虚构”的课，但他并不认为这个词是他发明的。

Judging from the above chain of contempt that is not conjecture, whether journalism or literature, as a category, genre cannot simply be understood as a conventional classification of recognizable text or discursive practices, says Jelle, assistant professor at Vrije Universiteit Brussel Mast) emphasizes that genre is defined as a purposeful communicative event that is socially embedded in a specific discursive community and achieved through the support of available media (technology), while providing entry into broader group identities, socio-cultural belief systems, and normative political ideals or epistemologies.

When I was working as a journalist, I found that my current colleagues thought they were "angels of documentaries" and were aggrieved to work as TV news for the time being, and I also found that my colleagues thought they were "literary angels" and fell into the press industry to become journalists. In the past ten years, "non-fiction" has become more and more popular, and there seem to be more people learning Hemingway.

It is regrettable that in the journalism department, there are students who are obsessed with soft news far more than hard news, and obsessed with the literary nature of news far more than the amount of information. For such a student, we can't bear to ask him: why don't you go directly to the Faculty of Letters?

News has its own value in journalism. When reporters can't face the news directly, and the news can't face the present, no matter how much they borrow literary techniques, no matter how much they beg literature and beg non-fiction, they can't pull back the reader's attention.

This article refers to the following citation format:

Zhuang Yongzhi.Is it called "non-fiction", is it higher than the style of journalism[J].Young Reporter,2023(24):128.)