When it comes to first-person anecdotes, one driving factor is that many web journalists have both intense traffic pressures and steep competition. That means stories not only need to be written more quickly than before, they also have to be more interesting than their rivals’. Just as in the olden days, a story with a snappy lead is more likely to take off among readers. And yet, there’s rarely enough time to call people to ask them about their run-of-the-mill experiences for every single post.

To see the difference, I looked up a few news stories about weight loss from the 1980s, and the results are jam-packed with yarns like these:

Three years ago, Barbara, who is in her early thirties and 5-foot-2, weighed 187 pounds. Now, she weighs 127. She said she woke up one morning and decided she was serious about losing weight. "I was unhappy," she said, "I figured out what was making me unhappy, and I began eating less food and walking up and down the street at night."

and

Ewing says he hasn't been able to incorporate a walk around Lido Island, where he lives, into his busy daily routine. Instead of six or seven times a week, he has been walking only about three times a week. He intends to walk more often but says he has trouble executing his plans. "Like the other night, there was a boat parade party, so I couldn't go then. So I got up and did my walk in the morning, but that's a problem because then I get to work later and I'm behind all day."

Ewing and Barbara's stories are quaint and kind of interesting, but they’re also time-consuming to gather. Today, we still take the time to seek out sources who have unusual or specific experiences. We also go out of our way to give voice to people who aren’t likely to jot down a personal narrative. But if we need a good example of something mundane, like being sad in the summertime, say, or fearing ghosts, sometimes we literally write what we know: our own lives.

This tendency, combined with the proliferation of the confessional first-person essay, has generated pushback—some of it deserved. The author Eve Fairbanks wrote that reporters should seek out people who might not have access to a laptop and a How to Pitch Atlantic Editors textbook, and to interview many sources for a richer narrative. (Ironically, she wrote this in Post Everything, the Washington Post blog that runs personal essays.) And in a world where most journalists at major publications come from monolithically well-off backgrounds, their personal anecdotes can only reflect a tiny part of the world. There's a danger of the navel-gazing eating away at diversity.

There can also be some weird blame-shifting by publishers when personal essays spark controversy. Thought Catalog has gotten heat for posting virtually unedited diatribes—including those that seem racist or sexist. By publishing opinionated takes, some sites find it easier in the aftermath to throw up their hands and yell, “They said it, not us!”