JOURNALISM 392W - First Person Journalism

These types of stories are always interesting to me. It’s the type of writing I most enjoy doing, because it essentially boils down to storytelling, and since the story being told is one that centers around the tellers experience, the demand for certain journalistic norms like objectivity, neutrality, and specific formula are nearly non-existent. You can really write whatever you want to say about the topic, and you don’t even have to necessarily worry about staying within the confines of common decency, as can be seen in Scott Brodeur’s piece about Joe Lieberman, which is essentially a story about two men peeing.

What I think is important to note is that the newsworthiness of these types of stories often varies a lot from the majority of hard news. For example in the Lieberman story the newsworthiness essentially comes from the novelty of seeing a famous politician in a rest area bathroom, and the fact that it’s a famous politician. In the “Sucking Up” article, the newsworthiness seems to come almost strictly from the emotional proximity the author’s scenario might have to other people. One commonality here is that the newsworthiness for these articles is more about what is newsworthy for the author than what is newsworthy for the reader.

Yet somehow I still find myself interested in reading them. Like I said, I really enjoy first person journalism, but on another level, I’m glad the majority of professional journalism isn’t written in the first person, because I think it has the affect of really detracting from important issues, and discussions of societal trends in favor of gossipy sort of pseudoinformation.