It was society-wakening at the time. He employed aspects of yellow journalism to draw attention to the dark spots, to expose the mess lying underneath the fading formica surface on American public life and society.

He had to engage. He had to annoy and disgust and enrage. It all started around the time of Nixon's dirty tricks campaign and they bludgeoned politics into the festering pit of corruption and back-hand deals it is now. That game they played didn't slow down. People like Roger Stone doubled down each time they had a chance, and they got rich off of doing so to the great detriment of much of the US. There was no stopping. The "good" people in politics didn't play the same way, and they continually got buried by drama and scandal.

You see, he couldn't just report on it. He had to make it real. The problem was, with time the issues became decentralized and more common. That's when he began to lose heart. This is why by the end of his life he had no laser-like focus any longer.

I understand where you're coming from, but he shouldn't be conflated with the type of the self-indulgent writing you get from the likes of Vice. Those guys just often grew up worshipping this guy because it wasn't "boring" newspaper reporting, and they all want to be him. It's nothing like the same.

There are still takeaway lessons, though. The whole gonzo thing got journalists more interested in the field and long-term investigating on a personal level. I've seen some great docs that occur in first person in really interesting and sometimes life-threatening scenes because of the influence of HST.

edit: grammar

Just to make it clear - my beef is not with HSJ himself but with the followers. Yeah, it made sense for him to write this way. But I hate digging through this shitty "first-person, rich in detail" narration just to get to a mildly interesting interview or report from an event.

Ah, then your best not to turn to him or his followers for that kind of writing.

As a rule I go to newspapers for terse/concise reports and interviews. I go to magazines and long-form articles for a larger picture. Trying it any other way will probably just be frustrating no matter who's writing.

It was fresh once. I feel the same way about the current style of ranty blog posts where the author drops a lot of excessive swearing, caps, and exclamation marks into a post about some relatively mundane subject, like grilled cheese or wet shaving or whatever. I laughed out loud and genuinely enjoyed it the first time I saw it, but that was like... 2008? It's not really funny anymore.

Clean, clear, and concise language never goes out of style. I wish more writers would learn it.

It's called Gonzo journalism and Hunter S. Thompson popularized the style in the 1970s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gonzo_journalism).