Abstract
Rosalind Coward convincingly argues that personal writing has played an increasing role in journalism and deserves greater study. She takes a step in that direction in Speaking Personally: the Rise of Subjective and Confessional Journalism. Coward examines several forms of personal writing, including news features, opinion columns, and blogs. Coward has personal experience with personal writing. She once wrote a column for the Guardian newspaper about caring for her mother after she had been diagnosed with dementia.
Although most of the book is dedicated to forms of writing that are upfront about their subjectivity, Coward points out that the personal voice has played a role even in purportedly ‘objective’ journalism. She joins numerous other journalism scholars who have argued that objectivity is an unattainable ideal, and that transparency might be a better alternative. Coward argues that the personal voices of reporters and editors come through in the ways they frame news stories, even when those stories appear to be purely fact-based. Personal voices also pervade journalism in the form of reportage. Journalists write themselves into their stories when they describe the scenes of news events or contextualize their reporting with background information.
Coward next delves into newspaper opinion sections. By designating a specific place for readers to find editorials and op-eds, Coward argues that newspapers intended to communicate that all other sections would be reliably opinion-free. But personal voices have increasingly spilled out to other sections of the newspaper. One reason was that newspapers increasingly felt they had to differentiate their product from that of television news, which beat them on breaking stories. Newspapers saw an opportunity to compete in the area of news analysis, however, helping their readers interpret the meaning of news events. Newspapers also began to value personal writing more once they recognized that strong viewpoints attracted more readers.
The New Journalism movement was, according to Coward, the first time that journalists recognized themselves as challenging ‘the straightjacket of objective journalism’ (p. 52). Authors like Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote, and Hunter S. Thompson stretched the boundaries of traditional reporting by writing in the first person and deliberately involving themselves in the stories they covered. Coward argues that the New Journalism movement revealed that the personal voice could amplify, not detract from reporting. It came from ‘not a journalist standing outside his subject but a journalist right inside it’ (p. 62). Thompson, for instance, spent a year immersed in the Hell’s Angels motorcycle club in order to learn about their inner workings.
In the fourth chapter, ‘Getting Closer: Feminisation, Featurisation and the Confessional Society,’ Coward explores connections between subjective writing and ‘lifestyle’ stories that have often been deemed women’s territory. Coward traces the history of newspaper women’s pages, whose content varied according to whoever was in charge of them at the time. The existence of women’s pages could help ensure that topics and perspectives which were important to women would be covered—or it could confine their interests to the ‘velvet ghetto.’ Coward describes how journalists like Mary Stott, Jill Tweedie, and Anna Quindlen wrestled with this dilemma. Coward also finds that women journalists had an ‘early association with emotionality’ (p. 72), often assigned to write human-focused stories to complement the harder, fact-oriented versions authored by men. Some women disparaged as ‘the sob sisters,’ for example, wrote about the personal dramas associated with court cases that made news. But like subjective writing in general, Coward finds that emotional writing has gained appeal. Straight reporting is dry and boring; emotional reporting is intimate and relatable.
There is a downside, however, in writing that appeals to emotion. Some writers have stretched the truth in order to make their ‘true stories’ more dramatic. Examples abound, including James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces, which Oprah had selected for her book club before Frey was exposed as a fraud. The problem with personal stories, Coward observes, is that their authenticity can be difficult, if not impossible, to verify. We must trust the people who tell those stories. Another problem with what Coward calls ‘confessional journalism’ is that while such stories can be helpful to readers, they may be harmful to their authors—particularly women. Confessional writing often focuses on problems and personal weaknesses. Freelance journalist Jill Parkin wrote that editors often sought columns from women on the theme of ‘fem-humiliation’—in particular, negative feelings about their bodies.
Confessional writing can also be harmful to other people. The people who appear in confessional stories are not always asked for permission, or informed at all. Coward writes of her own concerns related to the column she wrote about her mother. While her mother was aware of her column and supported it, Coward still agonized over whether someone with dementia could truly give informed consent. Coward cites numerous other examples of writers who made their private lives public, only to see their personal relationships come unraveled. The unraveling makes for fascinating reading, and newspapers undoubtedly appreciate the attention—but at what cost to the writers and their loved ones?
Finally, Coward addresses blogging. Calling all blogs ‘journalism’ might seem to be a stretch—their styles can vary widely. But Coward points out that blogs can reflect the same “cultural impulses” that led to the increasing use of the personal voice in journalism, namely a ‘growing urge to display and witness intimate life events as well as foregrounding the personality who is speaking’ (p. 119). Bloggers, like other confessional writers, can also draw larger followings by focusing on “misery and tragedies” (p. 129) rather than the mundane details of their lives, and can suffer negative consequences by making their private lives public. Coward notes that blogs are different from confessional journalism, however, in their lack of editorial gatekeepers. Because bloggers can publish instantly and independently, they have a less mediated, more personal relationship with their readers.
Coward alludes several times in her book to academics who have snobbishly dismissed the importance of personal writing in journalism. The claim seems believable enough, and a lack of scholarship on the topic is in itself one potential indicator of such snobbishness. Given that Coward addresses several kinds of personal writing in her book, it would be helpful to know more about which scholars Coward intends to critique, and what their specific arguments are. If Coward identified them explicitly, and explained why they were mistaken, the book could have been even stronger.
Nonetheless, Coward’s book is a welcome addition to journalism studies literature. She provides compelling arguments for why personal voices have become more pervasive in journalism, and why those voices should be heard.