The term was coined by Norman Sims, now chair of the Journalism Department at U-Mass-Amherst, in an anthology he edited in 1985, The Literary Journalists. I used that anthology, incidentally, in a course on literary journalism I taught at Westfield State in the late 80s. In the latter weeks of that course, students tried to write a piece of literary journalism -- with varying degrees of success. I remember one marvelous piece on Springfield's homeless people. It's not easy to get agreement on a single definition of literary journalism
Here's how I see it:
It is "journalism" because A) it deals with facts (though any discussion of narrative and facts these days is problematic) and B) its practitioners use the traditional techniques of news-gathering -- interview, observation, and research -- to "immerse" themselves in their subjects.
It is "literary" because its practitioners use story-telling techniques that we have traditionally associated with fiction: detailed description of setting, construction of "scenes," focus on interesting characters, use of points of view, including re-creation of characters' thought processes.
There is also in the practice of literary journalism often a focus on subjects that would not normally have been tackled in the conventional newsroom. An interesting book available in our own library is Walt Harrington's Intimate Journalism. Harrington calls intimate journalism a "subgenre" of literary journalism. Check it out some day when you have time -- PN 4784 F37 I58 1997.
Harrington, by the way, is a frequent contributor to WriterL, a listserve to which I belong and to which you can belong for $20 a year. Among the other members of the list, which numbers several hundred writers and teachers, is Sims and Roy Peter Clark of the Poynter Institute (see the link on my page), who has written serial narratives for the St. Petersburg Times and is one of the moving forces behind newspapers' experimentation with narrative.
Magazine and book writers, especially, but increasingly newspaper writers are trying their hands at the genre. A recent conference on narrative at Boston University, run, incidentally, by Mark Kramer, a literary journalist and professor, co-editor with Sims of another lit J anthology, and the author of one of my favorite lit J books, Three Farms, drew hundreds of newspaper writers and editors. I would count among the practitioners many of the feature writers who have won Pulitzers for feature writing since the prize was first offered in 1979.
I'd try Home Town, the latest book by Tracy Kidder, one of the most-respected contemporary literary journalists. Most of you have been to Northampton, which is the home town of the book, and its central character, Tommy O'Connor, is a graduate of Westfield State. One of Kidder's earlier books, Among Schoolchildren, also focused on a Westfield State grad, Christine Zajac, who, at the time of the book's writing, was a teacher in a Holyoke public school.
Other recent books I've liked are The Meadowlands by Robert Sullivan, On the Rez by Ian Frazier, and A Piece of the Action by Joseph Nocera. The guru of literary journalism, in the eyes of many writers, is John McPhee. I tend to prefer his earlier books (A Sense of Where You Are on Bill Bradley as basketball player) and The Pine Barrens (on a fascinating area of New Jersey that most of you don't know is there), but anything by McPhee shows a craftsman at work.
A number of earlier writers, including, perhaps, Daniel Defoe, can be -- and have been -- classified as literary journalists. In my own course, for example, I asked students to read, among other books, Down and Out in Paris and London by Orwell and Death in the Afternoon by Hemingway.
Literary Journalism, edited by Sims and Kramer, is a nice introduction to present practitioners of the genre.