“I” Have Returned: Why First-Person Storytelling Is Journalism’s Order of the Day

Just occasionally, I attend the raucous parties of beat journalists. Booze-soaked and noisy, they make me somewhat uncomfortable — forcing this self-conscious introvert to emerge from a cozy shell and schmooze with ear-to-ear enthusiasm. Who said journalists had to be social?

My discomfort is only worsened by the average age of the partiers in attendance; if I were to guess, most of the word-slingers in parties I attended shortly pre-COVID were in their 20s. I’m creeping up on 40.

Still, I tried to engage. At one point in a stunted conversation with a fresh college graduate, wide-eyed and plied with tequila, I talked up my love affair with gonzo journalism and the trail-blazing Hunter S. Thompson. This, I thought, would inspire fiery feedback — either gushing agreement or outspoken disavowing of any such off-the-wall, quasi-sacrilegious nonsense.

But that’s not what I got. “Who?” her puzzled look shot back, searching for something recognizable in my statement to latch onto. For half a second, I debated explaining the origins of the “I” in journalism and the provenance of Thompson, but it seemed pointless. I just rephrased: “First-person narratives — it makes journalism more relatable.”

I said this like a standard-bearer of 21st journalism, ushering in a revolutionary new approach to reporting. I have no claims to such invention, of course, and while I pushed for it in my little corner of the journalistic world when third-person was still de rigeur, I was by no means first to do so.

Lately, first-person narrative is widely encouraged — not in all media, certainly, but it has taken hold in bastions of journalism like The New York Times, where “I” now dots deeply informative articles that frame our view of the modern world.

The reason is not hard to pinpoint; character-devoid writing is a farce. You can oust first-person pronouns, but that hardly means the person is absent from their writing. Case in point, absorbed eons ago in graduate Biblical studies courses: God did not sit down with parchment and quill to pen the history of the faithful we now know as the Bible; human scribes and storytellers did, inclusive of their biases and opinions.

I’ll admit that Thompson’s gonzo journalism was more nuanced than simple first-person storytelling. His work was brightly colored and erupting with emotion — so much so, I found some of his commentary hard to digest.

Nonetheless, his unapologetic “I” has a foothold now. We have pulled back the veil and acknowledged that writers have their own perspective — which is, in fact, why we want them to write. We want to see humanity at work in storytelling because it reminds us there are countless sides to every story. We all carry our own misguided assumptions, loud opinions, and many-layered context with us in our work. We are complicated humans exploring the world of complicated humans; true objectivity is a joke.

I count this as a blessing — not only because we, as writers, can come to our work as whole, unadulterated selves, but because it reminds our readers that the world’s writing-reading dynamic is forever a juggle of perspectives, underscored by an exhortation to think for oneself. Within every interview, article, narrative, snippet lies the prompt: “This is my view of things. What’s yours?”