The many different faces of journalism

Besides reading Undressing Victoria by Erika Vidal and feeling real down about my upcoming English degree and wondering, Will I too be working at a place that I never really expected myself to be at? Like a person sitting on the cold concrete ground of Grand Central Station playing the guitar badly and asking for change and to get even more change, will perform a Britney Spears choice of dance?

Yeah, besides that sharp feeling digging into my mind, the piece made me realize what literary journalism looks like. Or at least, how some might write it.

Stripped for Parts by Jennifer Kahn presented literary journalism as a piece that introduces you to the world of organ transplants. She opens her piece with a hook that makes the reader want to read on. The television playing a reality television show in the dead man’s room. The color of the dead man’s skin. The twitch the foot makes when it’s scratched. It pulls the reader in who would not nearly read about organ transplants. But that’s the thing, isn’t it? Kahn doesn’t tell the reader that she will be writing about organ transplants until the third paragraph and it feels like a good right jab in the face. The reader was reading along, probably believing they were about to read an interesting story (which it was, but still) about dead persons and how they got that way.

In the news journalistic examples we get from newspapers across the country, the journalist has to state their purpose of their article in the beginning few sentences, they can not string along the reader for as long as Kahn displayed in her piece.

Vidal’s piece is 98% story and 2% fact. She fills the piece with her personal feelings and her experience about going on a job interview at Victoria’s Secret. The first person usage of ‘I’ is of course present and of course, such a thing will not be seen in a news journalism piece. The reporters report what they see and use their words to create an atmosphere for the piece. In what I’ve read so far about literary journalism, it seems as though the author’s use their words to tell how they feel. Kahn used her piece to almost slant the reader’s thoughts about organ transplants and Vidal decides to take a look at the backstage workings of retail giant, Victoria Secret.

The difference between a memoirs and personal essays is that literary journalism offers facts. Somewhere in the piece will be some form of fact and research. In memoirs and personal essays, such things might be omitted.