Personal essays serve as self-authorizing résumé gateways for marginalized writers

Evidence

While a number of the original venues that promoted this genre have closed since late 2015 (Gawker, xoJane, the Toast, the Awl, the Hairpin), other well-funded mainstream venues like Huffington Post and the Guardian have added their own regular proprietary personal essay features (e.g., HuffPo’s Voices). This rise has also been fed by the impression that personal essays are good gateway résumé lines for women and nonwhite people in an industry that too often relies upon networking. It doesn’t so much matter who you know as what you’ve self-authorized. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 162