Literary Journalism Essay: It’s no secret that fact-based reporting has been suffering in recent decades. While there are many reasons for this (the growth of infotainment, the influence of partisan opinion masquerading as fact-based news, etc.), one promising response has been the rise of new, innovative, and substantive ways of telling what happens in the world to invigorate our fact-based reporting. In this assignment, you’ll write a literary journalism essay, a form of creative reportage that uses narrative storytelling techniques, photography (which is optional in this assignment), and rigorous research on the subject to explore a subject memorably and insightfully. Your subject will be a cultural phenomenon of your choice. It could be America’s sticky dependence on the internal combustion engine. It could be the rise of the unhoused population in Boulder Country. It could be EDM shows. It could be Colorado ski culture. It could be AI and student life. It could be the farm-to-table restaurant biz. It’s up to you! The goal of this assignment will be to reach an audience well through literary journalism and change your audience so something they may have known only little about (or frankly just ignore most of the time) becomes significant to them. And one more thing, you’ll need to explore your personal relationship to your subject matter in this essay. As Doug Hesse & Becky Bradway have written about literary journalism in their textbook Creating Nonfiction, “Oddly, the act of centering a piece around a particular journalistic subject can give writers a door into their own selves.” You’ll want to open those doors, go through them, and explore/discover your own unique relationship to your subject matter in the process. This will only humanize your investigation, ultimately making your conclusions more memorable to your readers. This assignment requires at least 7-9 pages of alphabetic text, typed, double-spaced. At least one interview is required.
