The title of this article is The new confessional journalism turns female writers into tedious, self-hating semi-celebrities:
A first-person piece about, say, drug addiction in the week the government is voting on downgrading the classification of certain drugs is journalistically justified. An extended piece pegged to absolutely nothing in which a “former anorexic” journalist describes her hilarious horror at having to eat “normally” for three weeks is not, and simply suggests that the journalist can think of nothing to write about but herself.
But I might put forward a different hypothesis: Be it resolved that women created and popularized this genre of writing, rather than being victims of it.
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Brigitte adds: I’m not disagreeing with you, Andrea, but in my experience, editors (male or female) want popular pieces. And this sort of confessional stuff is popular – they’re like a car crash; horrifying yet oddly fascinating. We hate ourselves for reading those pieces. But enough of us read them to make them come back.
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Andrea adds: I’m not saying I’m 100 per cent sure that women did create the genre…at the same time neither am I sure that it was foisted upon us. Certainly the Oprah Winfrey world we live in demands confessional style everything from men and women alike.
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Women did create that genre, & introduced it to newspapers. I’m old enough to remember when they did. There’s a short history, going back only to the 1960s, & there’s a long history, going back to the reign of Queen Anne (1707-1714), when the first “tabloid personal narrative” articles were introduced into papers like the Spectator of Addison & Steele, expressly in order to appeal to woman readers.
But the short history is one of women attaining equality in the modern newsroom. There were always women on staff before, but they were a minority & they had to accommodate themselves to a fairly hardbitten masculine environment which embraced drinking & smoking & profanity, & in which merely suggesting a story like that would get a woman very seriously mocked. The taste was for hard news, not only about politics, business, sports, but even on the woman’s page: “stuff that happened just before we went to press.” E.g. fashion news was fashion news: it was from fashion reporters. Food was just seasonal recipes; even “dieting” would have been too silly. The whole narcissistic idea of “lifestyle” had yet to be invented. In particular, the use of the first person was very heavily discouraged, even on the editorial page.
Note: I’m not saying that the “woman’s point of view” cannot contribute to a broadening of journalism; or that there isn’t an important use for the first person; or that newspapers used to be perfect. I’m only saying that it hasn’t in fact contributed, except to the degeneration of newspapers — in combination with other factors.