In preparation for a seminar last Monday on the history of composition studies in the US, I was reading about cognitive and developmental research in this field from the 1970'es. And suddenly it became clear to me that a lot of the intuitive hostility towards first person reporting is based on exactly a developmental perspective on writing: If you make a self-centered presentation you tend to come across as somewhat primitive and immature.
The St. Martin's Guide to Teaching Writing summarizes the developmental perspective as being concerned with "the writer's cognitive growth from egocentrism to outreach" (181), an idea which is based on Piaget's hypothesis that "because children cannot conceive of the listener's perspective, they do not adapt their message to their audience's needs."
Within journalism this notion of youthful, self-centered writing has turned into a commonplace. For isn't it always the young reporter, the intern, who decides to use the opening paragraph to comment on the state of his own jeans in the rain on the way to the press conference (as was jokingly noted by Jes Stein Pedersen during this debate on the state of Danish journalism within the area of arts and culture).
I guess it is, and therefore the cliché becomes an even tougher constraint for older reporters whose jeans-clad personae are easily perceived as pathetic attempts on the reporters' part to stay young and sensitive in their writing (while still not able to reach out to their readers).
Like any commonplace, of course, this one can be and should be challenged on a case to case basis.
