Confessional Journalism, Authenticity and Lived Experiences: A Case Study of News Stories Published During the Irish Abortion Referendum

As part of a societal preoccupation with subjectivity and emotions, a discussion of authenticity has started to emerge in the professional practice of journalism. This is similar yet different to the more traditional notion of credibility: while credibility has connotations of truth-telling and unbiased reporting, authenticity points to other features, such as genuineness, intimacy, and, notoriously, trust, derived from what is regarded as an honest self. This article discusses the shift from a theoretical perspective and through an analysis of newspaper pieces written around the Irish Abortion Referendum of 2018. While some of these stories could be uncritically framed in the tradition of the so-called “personal essay” that is associated with “click-bait” journalism and cheap content, the article proposes that they present personal stories as a form of “witnessing” (Peters 2001) and “bearing witness” (Tait 2011), both of the journalists and writers’ own experiences and the experiences of others. The reflective tone becomes a dialogical form of correspondence between the author and the reader, where authenticity is derived in the relationship between the writer, the text, and the audience.