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Comment by boredumb | Hacker News Reader

Vice doing drugs and writing blogs for young adults is not akin to gonzo journalism.

How is it different? I am a huge Hunter S. Thompson fan but I don't think anything he did was any more important than "writing for young people and doing drugs"

Vice was a business that commercialized writing about drugs and providing a sympathetic lap for the resentful and demoralized. They had one good science writer that the whole scheme hinged on. HST's personal style changed journalism. He brought the techniques of insight from literary fiction to reportage, along with Thomas Wolfe, and the generation that followed.

Journalism was supposed to be objective, gonzo journalism is inherently not. Making the author a character in the story is the opposite of what a good journalist is to do…

Kids taking journalism classes might get to hear about Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72 (through The Boys on the Bus) and I think there’s a little bit more to that than just writing for young people and doing drugs.

There's good writing and there's bad writing. Without getting into specific articles, if "Gonzo Journalism" or "New Journalism" is what it takes to inform some people, that's good journalism. It's like the Daily Show & Colbert Report. An old (2004) study [0] showed that Daily Show & Colbert Report viewers were the more knowledgeable about national and international affairs compared to people who consumed Google news, CNN or Fox News.

0 - https://archive.thinkprogress.org/survey-daily-show-colbert-...

I think you are too cynical about Vice and too kind to HST.

Jon Ronson has written several incredible books that all qualify as Gonzo Journalism. The only one I didn't like very much was the one about the adult film industry.

The Psychopath Test So You've Been Publicly Shamed Them: Adventures with Extremists

All great books and even better audiobooks that you'll like I think.

What would you call this? I'd say it meets the bar for gonzo:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/43jp9d/we-found-evidence-of-...

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