A Cool New Journalism?
JA
September 28
Last week, Galleycat flagged what they called ‘a cool new future for journalism’ in the form of Isaac Littlejohn Eddy, a writer and cartoonist from Fort Greene in Brooklyn. For the past year or so, Eddy has been developing a particular style of feature/interview for the New York Times on their Local blog, blending a mix of illustrations, podcasts and text to create short, bite-sized stories. One example is this animated interview with an anonymous Hala Hala grocery shop owner, originally done for a competition on the topic of uncommon economic indicators.
Eddy’s hybrid style has been a bit of a sleeper hit and Vintage/Anchor recently commissioned him to conduct a series of interviews on its blog. The latest of these features political and cultural observer Hooman Majd, author of The Ayatollah Begs to Differ: The Paradox of Modern Iran. Eddy provides a series of cartoons and accompanying podcasts, which he hopes will give the reader ‘a small sense of being there’ - the interview is punctuated with the sound of background chatter, coffee shop music, street traffic and tinkering cutlery.
Hybrid journalism has also caught on at Barnes and Noble. Back in February, the company asked cartoonist Ward Sutton to do a series of illustrated book reviews. The first was on T.C. Boyle’s The Women but it’s his psychedelic take on Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice that really shows the full potential of crossover. Earlier, on Galleycat, Sutton said that ‘a cartoon review might attract people to reading something about a book in a way that a written review might not’. He also added, ‘I don’t believe that the cartoon form poses any threat to the art form of book reviews – if anything it’s a creative expansion.’
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Comments
28 Sep 09 at 12:49
'New New Journalism' - who is going to be Tom Wolfe to this generation? I'd put my hand up but I'm not that keen on using exclamation marks to make a point!!!!!! Wolfe too did illustrations, remember. They weren't great, but they were there. The real future for this is the internet which can bring it all together in the one place - film, art, writing, publishing. Meanjin has obviously done it's part with the Mandy Ord/Kate Fielding collaborations - graphic non-fiction is pretty exciting - hell, even the comic-ised 9/11 Commision Report was at the forefront. I look forwarrd to more of this style of work in the pages of Meanjin and elsewhere. Maybe eventually some brave small publisher will put out a full length work by some up and comer in the field.
...28 Sep 09 at 14:41
It would be good to see what visualists and web video producers could do in this space as well. Hybrid media seems a natural expansion into the gap created by audiences of newsmedia moving onto the web. Why simply move your text onto the web to meet them, why not animation, video, music and illustration as well? For breaking news it's not an efficient kind of content, but for analysis, criticism, review, editorial there are lots of opportunities.
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