Personal essays replacing journalism?

I've been thinking about this a lot lately, as I see the stories being shared by contacts in social media circles. It's rare to see a piece of journalism make the rounds – recent exception: CJ Chivers' NY Times piece on WMDs in Iraq – but there are times when the same essays show up over and over again.

And I've got a lot of journalists in my friends list. Some of them promote their own best work, others consciously share spectacular or interesting stuff they find. But outside that group, among my non-industry friends, it's almost always an essay that gets shared.

I'm apparently not the only one who has noticed the shift. Eve Fairbanks wrote about it for the Washington Post, in a link I found…