Gonzo Journalism Defined

"..Gonzo Journalism.  It is a style of “reporting” based on William Faulkner’s idea that the best fiction is far more true than any kind of journalism – and the best journalists have always known this.

            Which is not to say that Fiction is necessarily “more true” than Journalism – or vice versa – but that both “fiction” and “journalism” are artificial categories; and that both forms, at their best, are only two different means to the same end. This is getting pretty heavy . . . so I should cut back and explain, at this point, the Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is a failed experiment in Gonzo Journalism. My idea was to buy a fat notebook and record the whole thing, as it happened, then send in the notebook for publication – without editing. That way, I felt, the eye & mind of the journalist would be functioning as a camera. The writing would be selective & necessarily interpretive – but once the image was written, the words would be final; in the same way that a Cartier-Bresson photograph is always (he says) the full-frame negative. No alterations in the dark-room, no cutting or cropping, no spotting . . . no editing.

            But this is a hard thing to do, and in the end I found myself imposing an essentially fictional framework on what began as a piece of straight/crazy journalism. True Gonzo reporting needs the talents of a master journalist, the eye of an artist/photographer and the heavy balls of an actor. Because the writer must be a participant in the scene, while he’s writing it – or at least taping it, or even sketching it. Or all three. Probably the closest analogy to the ideal would be a film director/producer who writes his own scripts, does his own camera work and somehow manages to film himself in action, as the protagonist or at least a minor character.

The American print media are not ready for this kind of thing, yet. Rolling Stone was probably the only magazine in America where I could get the Vegas book published. I sent Sports Illustrated 2500 words - instead of the 250 they asked for - and my manuscript was aggressively rejected. They refused to even pay my minimum expenses . . ."

ATTRIBUTION:
Hunter S. Thompson (b. 1939), U.S. journalist.
The Great Shark Hunt, “Jacket Copy for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” (1979).

View it here on Google Books
or here on the Owl Farm Blog.

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Also,
watch John Nichols speak about "the failure of gonzo journalism and the triumph of gonzo citizens" here
from the July 2007 Aspen Institute-hosted symposium on the work of Hunter S. Thompson.