There’s a moment in every journalist’s career — if they’re paying attention — when they realise the story isn’t about them. The interview subject, the event, the policy, the human experience at the centre of the reporting: that’s the story. The journalist is the conduit, not the protagonist.

Somewhere in the past decade, a growing number of journalists stopped paying attention to that distinction.

I’m not talking about memoir or personal essay, where the writer’s experience is legitimately the subject. I’m talking about news reporting and analysis where the journalist’s reactions, personal brand, and online persona have begun crowding out the actual story.

A political reporter covering a policy announcement who spends half their article describing how the announcement made them feel. A foreign correspondent whose dispatches read more like travel memoir than conflict reporting. A technology journalist whose product review is primarily about their lifestyle and aesthetic preferences rather than how the product works.

This is main character syndrome applied to journalism, and it’s a genuine problem.

How We Got Here

The shift didn’t happen overnight, and it wasn’t intentional for most journalists. Social media created the conditions.

Before Twitter and its successors, journalists were largely invisible to their audiences. Readers knew the publication — The Age, the ABC, the Financial Review — but rarely the individual reporters. Your credibility derived from the masthead. Your audience was the publication’s audience.

Social media inverted that relationship. Journalists built personal followings. Their Twitter accounts became their brand. Engagement metrics rewarded personality, hot takes, and self-referential commentary. A dry, factual report about tax policy got 40 retweets. A snarky, personalised observation about the same policy got 4,000.

The incentive was clear: be more yourself, more opinionated, more present in the story. The platforms rewarded it. Editors, watching traffic numbers, tolerated or even encouraged it. And audiences, conditioned by social media to expect personality-driven content, began gravitating toward journalists who were entertaining over those who were informative.

The Reuters Institute Digital News Report has tracked this trend for years, noting that audiences increasingly follow individual journalists and commentators rather than publications. In Australia, trust in “the news” has declined while trust in specific individual journalists has remained relatively stable. The personal brand has become the trust mechanism, replacing institutional credibility.

The Damage It Does

The Story Shrinks

When a journalist becomes a character in their own reporting, the story inevitably contracts. There’s only so much space in an article, and every paragraph about the journalist’s reaction, personal history, or emotional response is a paragraph not given to the subject.

I read a piece recently about housing affordability in Western Sydney. It was published in a major outlet by a well-known reporter. The article opened with three paragraphs about the reporter’s own experience renting in the inner city, transitioned to their personal frustration with the political response, included two asides about their social media interactions on the topic, and finally — in paragraph seven — introduced the actual people affected by the housing crisis.

The families in Western Sydney deserved to be in paragraph one. Their stories, their experiences, their voices. Instead, they were supporting cast in the journalist’s narrative about the journalist.

Sources Become Props

When the journalist is the main character, interview subjects shift from being the story to serving the journalist’s narrative. Quotes become decorative rather than substantive. The person being interviewed isn’t telling their story — they’re providing material for the journalist’s story about encountering them.

This is subtle but corrosive. Readers notice, even if they can’t articulate what feels wrong. The coverage feels performed rather than reported. The journalist isn’t listening to their sources; they’re using them.

Accountability Gets Personal

When a journalist conflates their personal identity with their reporting, criticism of the reporting becomes criticism of the person. This makes corrections, factual disputes, and editorial accountability much harder.

A reporter who makes an error in a story they reported traditionally can issue a correction without existential crisis. A reporter who built the story around their personal perspective and emotional investment experiences a correction as a personal attack. The defensive response — doubling down, dismissing critics, framing factual disputes as harassment — follows predictably.

The Social Media Feedback Loop

The mechanism driving this behaviour is well understood. Social media platforms are designed to reward personal content over institutional content. An individual journalist’s tweet gets more engagement than the publication’s tweet sharing the same article. The journalist’s hot take gets shared more than their carefully reported story.

This creates a feedback loop: journalists who perform well on social media get more visibility, more followers, more speaking invitations, and often better career opportunities. The performance is rewarded, so the performance intensifies. The journalism — the actual reporting — becomes secondary to the journalist’s public persona.

Some news organisations have recognised this problem. The BBC’s social media guidelines explicitly address the tension between personal expression and editorial standards. The ABC in Australia has similar policies. But enforcement is inconsistent, and the guidelines are perpetually playing catch-up with platform dynamics.

The uncomfortable truth is that many newsrooms now need their journalists to be social media personalities because that’s where audience growth happens. The editorial guidelines say “maintain objectivity.” The business model says “build your personal brand.” These instructions conflict, and the business model usually wins.

What Good Journalism Looks Like

Lest this read as entirely pessimistic, it’s worth noting what the alternative looks like — and it’s not complicated.

The best journalism has always centred the subject, not the journalist. When Hedley Thomas produced “The Teacher’s Pet” podcast, one of Australia’s most impactful pieces of investigative journalism, the story was about Lynette Dawson and the people connected to her disappearance. Thomas’s reporting was meticulous, but he wasn’t the main character. The story was.

When Caro Meldrum-Hanna exposed abuse in youth detention facilities through the “Four Corners” investigation, the footage and testimony spoke for themselves. The reporting was rigorous. The reporter was present but not prominent.

This doesn’t mean journalism must be faceless or devoid of voice. Style, perspective, and analytical frameworks are legitimate tools. The distinction is between a journalist whose perspective illuminates the story and a journalist whose story has become the perspective.

Can It Be Fixed?

The structural incentives pushing toward personality-driven journalism aren’t going away. Social media will continue to reward personal content. Audience attention will continue gravitating toward entertainment over information. But several countermeasures could help.

Editorial leadership matters. Editors who consistently redirect stories from journalist-centred to subject-centred framing can maintain standards. This requires editors who are willing to push back against their most popular (and often most self-referential) writers. Some digital media consultancies, like one firm advising media organisations on editorial strategy, suggest that editorial standards and audience engagement aren’t inherently in tension — well-reported stories that centre their subjects can perform as well as personality-driven content when properly distributed.

Separate the personal brand from the reporting. If journalists want to share personal opinions and reactions, let them do it on personal channels clearly distinguished from their reporting. The problem isn’t that journalists have opinions. The problem is when opinions and personal narrative are woven inseparably into what’s presented as reporting.

Reward the reporting, not the performance. Journalism awards, internal recognition, and career advancement should be tied to the quality and impact of reporting — not social media metrics, public profile, or brand visibility. The current incentive structure often promotes the wrong behaviours.

Train for awareness. Journalism education should explicitly address the tension between personal brand-building and reporting integrity. New journalists entering the profession today have grown up in social media environments where self-expression is default behaviour. Teaching them to consciously separate their personal voice from their professional reporting is a skill that needs deliberate development.

The best journalists I’ve read and worked with share a quality: they disappear into their stories. You finish the piece thinking about the subject, the issue, the people involved — not the person who wrote it. That’s not a failure of personal branding. It’s a triumph of journalism.

And it’s worth defending, even as the incentives push in the other direction.