Memorable examples of this were seen during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the 14 days in 1962 when the United States and the Soviet Union squared off over the placement of Russian missiles in Cuba, and the four days' reportage of the assassination and funeral of John F. Kennedy.
I grazed in the Library of America's two volumes of reportage from the Second World War.
Buy the new Independent eBook - £1.99 Two decades of reportage on a tragic conflict the West can no longer afford to ignore - by one of the world's great foreign correspondents.
The menu, too, goes in shirtsleeves, dropping its one ostentatious item (Kobe beef from Seattle, $110 for ten ounces) and moving from grandiloquence (Panache of Three Salads) to reportage (Maine Lobster with Sweet Peas, Fava Beans, Haricots Verts, Blood Orange, and Port Wine Sauce).
There are also several deft journalistic pieces of eco-travel reportage, one involving the killing of birds in the Mediterranean, another, the efforts of Chinese bird-watchers in a country facing radical habitat loss.
· Stephen Smith is the culture correspondent of BBC Newsnight Three to read Reportage Imperium by Ryszard Kapuscinski The journalist's personal portrait of the life and death of the USSR, 1939 to 1991.
If you look at the three books of reportage he wrote — "Down and Out," "Road to Wigan Pier," then "Homage to Catalonia" — there is a progression not just in their quality but in the danger and discomfort Orwell put himself in.
Aside from tabloids such as the Daily Mail which uphold the old-school ideals of celeb reportage (three Cs: credulity, censoriousness and a concerted effort to divide women up into their constituent body parts), the advent of the meme age has transformed the way we talk about famous people.
In his new book, the intrepid journalist and author Matthew Collin, a former BBC foreign correspondent and author of seminal books on ecstasy culture and resistance movements, reveals in six pieces of reportage how music has been a force for cultural change, rebellion, and a way of creating temporary paradises.
A major New York newspaper held around $5,000 worth of work, including Iraq reportage, for two and a half years.
