* Any views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author and not of Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Our differences did not prevent us from reaching a profound understanding of one another,
It is difficult to find the words to express the degree of my gratitude for having participated in the Writing and Reporting News Course at the Thomson Reuters Foundation in London. The programme taught me many things, but also reminded me of just how much I have yet to learn, both as a journalist and as a thinking human being. I feel so inspired and so driven and have been given a lot of food for thought.
DIVERSE BUT UNITED
“Who would you be if you weren’t a journalist?” asked Mathieu, leaning forward and eagerly awaiting our responses as he sat cross-legged on our classroom table in a suit and impeccably clean shoes.
Mathieu – a poetry club-loving, curly-haired, British French-American polyglot and Mergers and Acquisitions reporter who claims to eat everything but celery – was one of our teachers. He had started his career doing hidden camera investigative reporting in Boston, and then went on to work for Reuters, Bloomberg and the Independent newspaper, and travel across the world.
Ros, our other teacher and an editor at Reuters, is also an incredibly inspirational journalist who had bravely reported from wars zones and disaster-stricken regions throughout her career. She, too, had worked all over the world, having travelled to East Africa, Myanmar, and Thailand, and covered the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Everyone sat in silence for a moment. Some people looked up and furrowed their brows in concentration. Smiles soon faintly spread across their faces and hopeful glimmers settled in their eyes, as they warmly reminisced of childhood dreams.
“I would be a chef and explore the entire world through my cooking,” said Tung, a journalist from Vietnam’s VN Express, whose confession was met with nods of approval, tummy rubs, and echoes of oohs and ahhs across the room.
“I would open a small boutique shop and sell clothes and beautiful things,” said Jun, a London-based reporter for China’s Xinhua News Agency, who, despite her kind and shy demeanour, was outspoken about her strong moral stances.
MeySam, an Iranian dissident who now lived in London, spoke next. “I would be a carpenter or a picture editor,” he said, laughing heartily.
“A carpenter or a picture editor? Hmm. Interesting,” I thought, and instantly pictured Gepetto posing for the camera with Pinocchio-like marionettes who shared breaking news with one another.
One by one, the other participants followed suit and shared. Among us we had everyone imaginable, from an actress to an NGO worker fighting poverty and domestic violence. Everyone had such diverse passions and came from such different cultural backgrounds. The great level of diversity, with regard to both geography and specialty in journalism, among participants and staff was arguably that which rendered the programme most inspiring.
Brazil, Zimbabwe, and Bulgaria were just three of the countries our group represented.
In our lives, we had all had different experiences: different blessings and different horrors; different successes and different failures. We all preferred different leisurely activities, watched different shows, and spoke different languages.
Some of us were strict vegetarians and some considered canine meat a savoury delicacy.
But none of these differences mattered, because we were there, we were together, and we were friends. We were friends who were all committed to journalism and to accomplishing change for the betterment of society; and we could not help but be in awe of one another.
FASTER IS NOT ALWAYS BETTER
During the programme, we discussed various issues, from ethics to legal dangers. We had admirably knowledgeable speakers, as well as challenging assignments, crises simulations, mock press conferences and interviews, and many other useful training elements that served to discipline us and develop our meticulousness as journalists.
But one of the things that I was most grateful for was being reminded of the basics.
The more experience you gain as a journalist, the more automatic your writing becomes. Automatic does not mean mechanical and lifeless. Automatic means instinctive.
You instinctively write a lead the way you know that it should be written, find an appropriate paragraph without much exertion, and phrase a headline using precisely the type of language that will attract a reader.
This may not be a bad thing and does not mean that you are careless; you are simply too “experienced” and too interested in the content of your story – the meat and potatoes, so to say – to stop and question its structure. But this is sort of like muscle memory, where muscle memory is not always your friend.
For example, if you learn to dance the cha cha cha incorrectly, you will find that retraining your body is terribly difficult. You might realise that you dance in a ridiculous manner, but find yourself struggling to dance otherwise because the wrong movements have become instinctive.
So, it is important to remind yourself of the basics before it becomes too late. Ros and Mathieu encouraged us to scrutinise our work every step of the way in order to ensure that our enthusiasm to put news on the wire did not overshadow our commitment to writing news both thoughtfully and well.
The failure of many people to go back to the basics is likely tied to speed.
“Speed is the form of ecstasy the technological revolution has bestowed on man,” wrote Czech writer Milan Kundera in his novel Slowness.
Most people today, especially city-dwellers, are guilty of taking this “drug” that makes us like Energizer bunnies – we just keep going, and going, and going, and we cannot stop.
In journalism, especially at a news agency, time - down to the second – is everything! You must release a piece of juicy news before your competitors do, or you are doomed. So you rush.
But speed does not guarantee quality, and, in fact, makes you more vulnerable to making foolish and careless mistakes, which is another lesson that we learned through this programme.
Worst of all, speed prevents you from seeing the bigger picture and from pausing to reassess your priorities and to ask yourself whether what you are doing is really what you consider worthwhile.
ON JOURNALISM
Our differences did not prevent us from reaching a profound understanding of one another, which was excellent, since one of our jobs as journalists is to help people all over the world develop understanding.
I have always believed that the written word, especially in the form of books and good journalism, is an indispensable tool which enables people not just to communicate ideas or leave a permanent record of historical events or of their ponderings, but to reach an understanding, despite the differences that they perceive in one another.
All people can all relate to one another on a profound and humane level if they truly want to and if they truly listen, regardless of their nationalities, ethnicities, skin colour, height, weight, or sexual orientation, among an entire range of absurd and insignificant factors that blind people into seeing bad in others, without knowing anything of their character, values, and actions.
The key is remembering that everyone is unique, and that people can agree on some issues and disagree on others but remain understanding and accepting of one another, because, despite all of our individual characteristics, we all remain fundamentally similar.
It was heart-warming and humbling to see my fellow participants, some of whom had flown in from remote corners of the world or had never even been out of their countries before, gathering in our classroom day after day to become better journalists, to learn, and to improve their crafts.
For me, journalism – that is, decent and ethical journalism – offers a great hope for the future. It is a very noble profession, a profession that many people give their lives for.
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