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 shared by Creative Nonfiction.
From Fairbanks’ piece:
They’re everywhere these days: stories along the formula “I Am an X, and Y Happened to Me!” These kind of confessional articles long constituted the barbarians lurking around the gates of traditional newspaper culture, appearing on XOJane or blogs or niche columns like Modern Love, while the serious journalistic real estate remained dominated by authority figures like Larry Summers or Aaron David Miller pontificating on the economy or Israel-Palestine.
Now, though, they’re in the citadel. CNN has announced a new “First Person” project, a “series of personal essays exploring identity and personal points of view that shape who we are.” BuzzFeed has put out a call for first-person essays. This magazine, PostEverything, has excelled at the trend, promoting first-person takes from an undocumented immigrant who went to Harvard, a cop who advised civilians not to challenge him if they didn’t want to get hurt, and a Mercedes owner who found herself relying on food stamps. (I was schooled as a traditional political reporter, but I’ve written these pieces, too, musings on my experiences cooking and growing plants on a balcony.)
Fairbanks wonders if slashing newsroom budgets and cutting staff has left little time for in-depth reporting, and the personal essay is filling the void, allowing writers to bring a lifetime of personal experience with them into the piece.
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