ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the spread of narrative literary journalism from magazine publishing in the 1960s to the daily newspapers of the late 1970s and beyond, and attempts to define its blurred arrival in the American “mainstream.” The genre, notably present in magazines such as The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Harper’s, and Esquire, gradually moved into newsprint when longform, human-point-of-view, narrative reporting crossed over first to the alternative weeklies and then to respected large-circulation newspapers such as The St. Petersburg Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, The Oregonian, and The New York Times. The chapter, drawing extensively from published examples, proceedings of the American Society of News Editors, and extant and fresh interviews, traces the significant streams that fed and enlarged the mainstream: origins in the so-called “women’s pages” and “lifestyle sections,” the rise of on-staff writing coaches, and the increasing availability of models and professional development through anthologies, conferences, and the resources of the Poynter Institute. The chapter argues that narrative, literary newspaper journalism grew in response to worrisome trends in circulation at a time when robust advertising revenues allowed publishers to invest heavily and creatively in the quality of their newspapers’ reporting and writing.
