Hamilton Nolan rips into the tendency of young writers “to exploit every last tawdry twist and turn of their own lives for profit.” On the journalistic culture of innumerable memoirs and confessional essays:
The demoralizing truth is that there is a huge appetite for first-person essays of this sort. The pages of Salon, and Slate, and Thought Catalog, and XO Jane, and women’s magazines, and lowbrow-masquerading-as-highbrow publications like parts of the New York Times, and Gawker Media are absolutely overflowing with them. At their very best, they offer some amount of insight learned through experience. Mostly, they offer run of the mill voyeurism tinged with the desperation of attention addiction. For those who own the publications, they’re great—they bring in the clickety-clicks. But for the writers themselves, they are a short-lived and ultimately demeaning game. They are a path that ends in hackdom. And young writers who’ve paid good money to attend journalism classes should not be set on that path.
In an article we linked to earlier, Ann Friedman pushes back and uses the Dish, among others, as an example:
Two of my very favorite long-form feature writers, John Jeremiah Sullivan and Mac McClelland, are adept at weaving personal stories with their reporting. (Read this and this and this—and, just to bring it full circle, this from Andrew Sullivan—then try and tell me you still think good reporters don’t get personal.) There is an art to getting personal without obscuring the real story. Just as there’s an art to infusing your tweets and your commentary with a tinge of your nonprofessional life without going the full confessional.
The Dish 