The “factory farming” of confessional writing

Rich Juzwiak in Gawker on the questionnaire staff writers at Bustle fill out to determine whether they have personal stories that would make good copy:

The market rewards personal storytelling with attention — the more lurid and specific, the better. Just a few weeks ago, we saw a young xoJane writer seemingly pushed to the brink by what she perceived to be the demands of her job and her reluctance to reveal. Nora Ephron’s signature mantra “everything is copy” has become the norm, except everything can’t ever be enough when your job is to churn out posts on a routine basis.

What this survey looks like to me is a crystallization of the industrialization of confession. It’s an efficient, logical method for testing how much of their guts writers want to spill, and which guts exactly. It was probably inevitable that something like this would be invented, even if it didn’t come from a company whose entire genesis reportedly derived from a rather cynically deterministic view of what women want to read about. Its depressing inevitability resembles that of factory farming…