First-Person Journalism

Look, I happen to like first-person journalism. Most of my professors in graduate school were, at best, lukewarm about the “I,” the self-conscious presence of the storyteller in an article. Some outright despised it, calling the practice narcissistic and distracting.

Used judiciously, however, first-person narrative actually does the reader a service. By inserting himself into a story, the writer is coming clean that that events he depicts might reasonably been presented — or have unfolded, even — in an entirely different way had another journalist taken it on instead. Of course, I’m not talking about war reporting or baseball games, or any other subjects whose stories play out entirely outside the reporter’s act of reporting. But in the case of profile writing and, as Bill Wasik  points out below, especially with investigative stories that require undercover reporting, good journalism is equally constituted by the frank disclosure of personal circumstance as it is by facts.

“In times such as these, healthy citizenship requires the insertion of a human proxy into the stream of historical happenstance. What we need is an experimental subject, an “I” sufficiently armed with narrative powers both literary and historical, gifts of irony and indirection, and the soothing balms of description and implication, to go forth and find stories that might counteract the unhappy effects of our disorder. In the pages that follow [Submersion Journalism: Reporting in the Radical First Person, ed. Bill Wasik] you will find fifteen such literary proxies who, at great personal risk, have braved the perils of the Bush Era and returned to tell their tales. Many of them ventured undercover; all of them worked without the supervision of a guardian publicist. What distinguishes most of the dispatches collected here is what might be called the radical first person: in each case the individual consciousness of the writer is paramount. The reader thereby becomes privy to the writer’s experience and receives direct confirmation of its truth value. What results is not mere consumable opinion, the mystical commodity of mediated capitalism, but the raw material of a considered judgment, whether aesthetic, political, or ethical. In that judgment lies the cure for our affliction.” (B.W.)