When a woman journalist is invited to use the first person or inject some more 'attitude' into a piece, it is often a coded entreaty to beef up a specifically female perspective. The request may seem inocuous enough, but in taking such an invitation a woman takes her first step away from the neutrality and freedom of being simply a writer, towards the ghetto of writing 'as a woman',
writes Zoe Heller---quoted by Chambers, Steiner and Fleming in the volume below from 2004.
This book treats the topic of personalized journalism under the heading Confessional journalism and 'therapy news' and challenges anyone's intuitive and/or research based :-) appreciation of the personal perspective in journalism
1) by connecting it partly to intimate, personal columns, partly to Daily Mail style news stories which "frame the facts in emotive language and foreground... emergency workers' feelings over their tasks" (219); and
2) by attributing the trend to a history of journalism which holds female journalists responsible for bringing out the human interest factor - well, emotion as such - in news stories.
Zoe Heller's point seems fair and important (and supports a point made in another part of the book called (quoting Liz Trotta) 'But I don't do weddings': women's entry into the profession).
But - the general story strikes me as a very negative one to pass on: They let the women in and from then on it's been one long slippery slope to life style magazine type broad sheets and vulgar sensationalist tabloids?
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