Channel 4 is currently screening Shanghai Vice, a documentary about the Chinese police. It's the creation of Phil Agland, who made his name as a director of fictional feature films, including one called Beyond the Clouds. Now he's switched his gaze, to the ground below. Even the titans of contemporary literature are joining the stampede. Picking up his notebook once more is Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the king of magical realism.
Publishers are all too aware of the shift.
The cheap answer is that there's a gap in the market. Between them, they're teaching journalists their own craft. We are living in revolutionary times, he says, an era of such upheaval political, social, scientific and genetic - that the greatest stories are the ones unfolding before our very eyes. Fiction is anemic by comparison. Some writers have been defeated by that fact, retreating into the minutiae of personal experience.