The Art of Journalism

Ian Frazier (Photo by Sara Barrett)

Brian Dillon says of Cyril Connolly, “His failure as a writer was due not only to the temptations of journalism” (Essayism, 2017). Och, hard to believe that old prejudice – journalism as inferior art – is still hanging around. Dillon isn’t the only one guilty of it. James Wood, in a review of John Updike’s Licks of Love, says, “Every published word – if we mean art rather than journalism – should be as fine as it can possibly be” (“Gossip in Gilt,” London Review of Books, April 19, 2001). Janet Malcolm, in her Diana & Nikon (1980), writes, “If, then, photography is the (uppity) housemaid of painting (as journalism and criticism are the poor relations of poetry and fiction, where does that leave Photo-Realist photography?”

Journalism is the poor relation of poetry and fiction? Not in this eye, among beholders. For me, journalism is as much an art as any other form of writing – maybe even more so because journalism, unlike fiction, must be faithful to fact. That, in my view, makes it more difficult to do.

As a counterweight to Dillon, Wood and Malcolm’s condescension, I offer this:

Early on a recent morning, the sun came down the city’s canyons, hitting the white blooms of the pear trees behind the church. Construction workers walked west from the subway stops and kept going, to the under-construction buildings bordering the Hudson River, and soon the cranes started swinging against the blue sky and the elevators on tracks outside the buildings’ steel frameworks were going up and down. By eight o’clock, most of the staff had shown up, and some were preparing that day’s entrée—baked ham with sweet potato. Seagulls shrieked as they swirled overhead toward the river. First in line, by the church gate, a man in two hooded coats sat with his back against the fence, knees up, reading the News. White vans and box trucks pulled to the curb on Ninth Avenue and unloaded crates of broccoli and olive oil. Christopher Molinari, the head chef and culinary manager, said, “When all the restaurants started closing, some sent us their leftover supplies, and we’re still improvising menus from what we got. The food-service situation in the city changed so fast, some of the potatoes they sent us were already peeled."

That is from Ian Frazier’s wonderful “Still Open” (The New Yorker, April 6, 2020), a “Talk of the Town” piece on the soup kitchen at the Church of the Holy Apostles. Surely such splendid factual writing – so clear, specific, and vivid – ranks with the best that fiction and poetry have to offer.