Blame Malcolm Gladwell and Chris Anderson. Those guys sold a ton of their books (airport books) and now their style is creeping into journalism. The stories ar

Blame Malcolm Gladwell and Chris Anderson. Those guys sold a ton of their books (airport books) and now their style is creeping into journalism. The stories are not used as supporting evidence, references or as facts to build an overall conclusion to some new idea - but rather as infotainment, where the anecdotes are the whole point of the story and there is no real firm conclusion or over-arching theme that is proven. The anecdotes are easy to digest and repeat, which helps not smart people sound smart when they tell the same stories to a group of people.