"It's not about us."

Jill Abramson, on the growing trend of first-person essays/narratives - what she calls "narcissism" - in journalism:

Jill Abramson, Ex-New York Times Editor: The ‘Narcissistic’ NYT Is Making ‘Horrible Mistakes,’ Needs a ‘Course Correction’

“From four years of teaching at Harvard, so many of my students are interested in journalism, but they mostly want to write first-person, highly personal narratives about themselves. That may reflect their age. But I think there’s too much of that in journalism. It’s not about us. It’s about the world, and covering the world.”

 

Gotta live your best life, bro.

 

You're literally like a monkey who just learned he can throw his poop.

I think this is an important topic in the business. I don't like first-person intrusions in traditional narrative non-fiction, generally speaking—there are alway exceptions—but for me the personal essay is its own category. It's not traditional journalism. It's self-journalism, or memoir, and it follows one of the central tenets of good writing more than any other: Write what you know. A writer can tell his or her own story without the perils of translators or interpreters, and a great personal essay can knock me on my ass. If the New York Times were suddenly filled with personal essays at the expense of traditional journalism, then I would say that's a clear and obvious problem. But I feel like those two forms of non-fiction can live beside each other. I just don't like when they cross—that's when it becomes an issue, for me. I want my journalism to be journalism and my personal essays to be personal.

And, as always with this stuff, nobody is making anybody read anything.

 

First-person reports, for the most part, belong on your blog. Good luck, blogger!

 

Yeah, with a few notable exceptions, I have to agree with that. Far too much first-person these days in places where it does not belong.

 

Also, there's an app for that. It's why God gave you Yelp.

 

I think Abramson is encountering in real earnest for the first time the generation of people who grew up on and in social media.

They write in the first person because it's easy and they've never learned to do otherwise.

Worse, they're uncomfortable and suspicious of 3rd-person authorial omniscience.

That said, I don't believe this is the real problem at the NYT. Rather, it's the elders upstairs. Out of touch, out of step, out of money. Tentative. Lightheaded, thanks to the thin air atop Olympus.

All of which over the last ten years has eroded the paper's credibility. The last three years may have been the low point in the paper's history.

 

No secret that journalists -- even older ones -- tend toward self-absorption. You can see it in how they think everything is about them, even innocuous remarks aimed at others.

 

It's more there's a writer nominated for two magazine stories last year, on Dylann Roof and Missy Elliott, and she got a lot of acclaim for both, and she's all over both pieces.

I'm not saying both pieces aren't good. They are. What are they? Essays? Journalism? They didn't seem like essays. How can interview with Missy Elliott be an essay?

What's Bill Simmons? Well, Bill is the best-paid sportswriter in the world, credited for changing the form through his own pop culture references. Is he an essayist? I guess.

Perhaps it's always been "well, if the person is good, they can do whatever the they want, I like em, fuck critics." Perhaps it's more that way than ever. But one does wonder, at times: Is there any room to critique the principle even if the work is good? To say, yeah, it's good, but why are you in this?

The thing is...not every writer tends to framing a story through his or her own lens. Is that a talent or a tactic? And how does one discern the difference?

 

J.R. Moehringer and Tom Junod, some of our finer essayists?

 

Well, some people would argue that all stories are framed through the writer's lens—and some people would argue that using the first person is the more honest admission of that. I agree with the first part, but I don't agree with the second. A writer can guide the reader to a certain conclusion or certain belief without appearing in the piece. Kind of like magic—a good writer is an expert in sleight of hand, and you, as the reader, don't even know that you were being taken the entire time. But again, some people see that "omnipotence" as a small evil, that a visible hand (and all the accompanying admissions of biases and judgments) is more ethical, and in some ways less obtrusive, than an invisible one. But that's not how it works for me. I still find the use of "I" to be distracting unless there is a real purpose to it.

 

Whenever you decide to write a post of substance here, it will be your first. Look at your contributions to this board. Scan them now. They are shit smears masquerading as sentences. And yet you think you're smarter than everybody else.