The Participatory Journalism of Michael Herr, Norman Mailer, Hunter S. Thompson, and Joan Didion

Unlike journalists who adopted the conventions of detachment and objectivity, these New Journalists employed their subjective, literary styles to construct their narrative personae and to dramatize not only events like the Vietnam War and the 1972 presidential campaign, but their direct participation in stories they told by placing themselves in the center of the narratives as protagonists and openly acknowledging their subjective impressions of the events they covered.