Everybody knows about one form of competition among newspaper reporters, the so-called scoop competition. Scoop reporters competed with their counterparts on other newspapers, or wire services, to see who could get a story first and write it fastest; the bigger the story - i.e., the more it had to do with the matters of power or catastrophe - the better. In short, they were concerned with the main business of the newspaper. But there was this other lot of reporters as well … They tended to be what is known as “feature writers.” What they had in common was that they all regarded the newspaper as a motel you checked into overnight on the road to the final triumph. The idea was to get a job on a newspaper, keep body and soul together, pay the rent, get to know “the world,” accumulate “experience,” perhaps work some of the fat off your style - then, at some point, quit cold, say goodbye to journalism, move into a shack somewhere, work night and day for six months, and light up the sky with a final triumph. The final triumph was known as The Novel.
-Tom Wolfe, The New Journalism
He goes on to explain how the work of the New Journalists in fact replaces the novel as “literature’s main event.” An interesting read, as you can perhaps tell from the muted sarcasm in this particular passage.
