THE BEST OF WORLD TRADE
Remarks by Colombian journalist and writer Gabriel García Márquez, Nobel Prize for Literature and president of the Foundation for New Latin American Journalism, in the 52nd. Assembly of the Inter American Press Association, IAPA, Los Angeles, USA, October 7, 1996.
A Colombian university asked what evidence of competency and vocation are those who wish to study journalism and the answer was categorical: "Journalists are not artists." These reflections, however, are based precisely on the certainty that journalism is a literary genre.
Some fifty years ago were out of fashion journalism schools. Was learned in the newsroom, in print shops in the little cafe across the street, in the binge drinking on Friday. The entire newspaper was a factory which was unequivocally informing them and opinions generated within a participatory environment that kept the morale on the job. As journalists we were always together, we made life together, and we were such fans of the office they did not talk about anything other than the office itself. The work involved a friendship group that even left little room for privacy. There were no institutional editorial boards, but at five pm, no official announcement, the entire plant staff paused for breath in the tensions of the day and came together for coffee anywhere in the newsroom. It was an open gathering where hot topics discussed in each section and gave the finishing touches on tomorrow's edition. Those who did not learn in those lectures and passionate ambulatory twenty-four hours a day, or who were bored so much talk about it, was because they wanted to or believed to be journalists, but in reality were not.
The paper could then into three main sections: news, features and news articles, and editorials. The most sensitive section and was highly regarded publisher. The underdog position was that of reporter, who was at the same time the apprentice and cargaladrillos connotation. The time and the same office have shown that the nervous system of journalism actually circulates in the opposite direction. Witnessed: at nineteen - the worst being a law student - I started my career as editor of editorials and went up slowly and with great difficulty down the stairs of the different sections, to the maximum level of reporter satin.
The same practice of the profession imposed the need to form a cultural base, and the same work environment to promote them. The reading was a work addiction. The self-taught tend to be avid and fast, and what those times were more than enough to keep giving way on life in the best profession in the world - as we called ourselves. Alberto Lleras Camargo, who was a journalist as long and twice president of Colombia, was not even high school.
The subsequent creation of schools of scholastic journalism was a reaction against the fact that the office complied lacked academic support. Now no longer just for print but for all the means invented and invented.
But its expansion was taken from street to the humble name which took the office from its origins in the fifteenth century, and now it is called journalism Ciencias de la Comunicación o Comunicación Social. El resultado, en general, no es alentador. Los muchachos que salen ilusionados de las academias, con la vida por delante, parecen desvinculados de la realidad y de sus problemas vitales, y prima un afán de protagonismo sobre la vocación y las aptitudes congénitas. Y en especial sobre las dos condiciones más importantes: la creatividad y la práctica.
La mayoría de los graduados llegan con deficiencias flagrantes, tienen graves problemas de gramática y ortografía, y dificultades para una comprensión reflexiva de textos. Algunos se precian de que pueden leer al revés un documento secreto sobre el escritorio de un ministro, de grabar diálogos casuales without warning to the caller, or to use as a conversation news agreed in advance as confidential. The most serious is that these attacks ethical obey a bold notion of office, taken conscientiously and with pride founded on the sacredness of the scoop at any price above all else. Not touched the ground that the best news is not always given first, but many times that there is better. Some, aware of their deficiencies, they feel cheated by the school and did not voice trembles to blame teachers for not having taught the virtues we now call them, and especially curious about life.
is true that these criticisms are valid for general education perverted by the overcrowding of schools following the flawed line of informative rather than formative. But in the specific case of journalism seems to be, well, that the office failed to evolve at the same rate as their instruments, and journalists were lost in the labyrinth of a shot without control technology into the future. That is, the companies have committed to fund the modernization fierce competition have left material and then forming his infantry and participation mechanisms that strengthen the professionalism in the past. Newsrooms are aseptic laboratories solo sailors, where it seems easier communicate with astronomical phenomena with the hearts of readers. The dehumanization is rampant.
is not easy to understand that technological splendor and the thrill of communications, both wanted in our day, anticipate and have served to aggravate the daily agony of press time. Beginners complain that publishers are granted three hours for a task at the moment of truth is impossible in less than six, they ordered material for two columns and when the truth is only half assigned, and Panic has no closing time and humor to explain why, let alone give them a word of consolation. "We did not even scold" says an eager cub reporter for direct communication with their bosses. Nothing: the editor was once a wise and compassionate father, barely has the strength and time for himself to survive the galleys of the technology.
I think it's the hustle and the restriction of what has downplayed the report, we always had as gender star, but it is also the most time, more research, more reflection, and a certain mastery of the art writing. Is really thorough and accurate reconstitution of the event. Ie: the full story, as happened in reality, so that the reader knows it as if it had been on the scene.
before the invention of the teletype and telex, radio operator calling a martyr captured the world's news flight between sidereal whistles, scholar and editor elaborate, complete with details and background, as we rebuild the entire skeleton of a dinosaur from a vertebra. Only the interpretation was closed because it was a sacred domain of the director, whose editorials were believed written by him, although they were not, and almost always so tangled famous calligraphy. Historical directors had personal typesetters to decipher.
An important advance in this half century is now being discussed and in the news and opinion In the report, and is enriched with data publishing information. However, the results do not seem to be the best, because never before been so dangerous this job. The unbridled use of quotation marks in certain false or misleading allows innocent or deliberate manipulations and distortions malignant poison that give the story the magnitude of a deadly weapon. Quotations from sources that deserve full credit, people generally well informed or senior official who asked not to reveal his name, or observers who know everything and no one sees, to protect all kinds of wrongs unpunished. But the culprit is entrenched in their right not to disclose the source, without wondering if he is not an easy from that source that transmitted the information as desired and arranged the way you agreed. I think so: evil journalist think your source is your life itself - especially if that officer and the sacred, condoned, protects, and ends up setting a dangerous relationship with her complicity, which takes even the decency to underestimate the second source.
At the risk of being too anecdotal, I think there is another big culprit in this drama: the recorder. Before it was invented, the job was done well with three labor resources were in fact only one: the notebook, an ethic in every test, and a pair of ears that reporters still used to hear what they said. Professional and ethical management of the recorder is invented. Someone needs to teach the younger colleagues that the tape is not a substitute for memory, but an evolution of the humble notebook that such good services provided in the origins of the trade. The recorder hear but not listen, repeat - a digital parrot - but do not think is true but has no heart, and ultimately its literal version is not as reliable as that of someone who pays attention to the living words of the interlocutor, the values \u200b\u200bwith their intelligence and their moral qualifies. For the radio has the enormous advantage of the literal and immediate, but many interviewers are not listening responses by thinking about the next question.
The recorder is to blame for the vicious magnification of the interview. The radio and television, by its very nature, became the highest genus, but the press seems to share the misconception that the voice of truth is not so much the journalist that he saw as the interviewee said. For many newspaper editors transcription is the acid test: confuse the sound of words, faced with semantics, shipwrecked on the spelling and die by the stroke of syntax. Perhaps the solution is a return to the poor little book of notes for the journalist to be edited with your intelligence As you listen, and you leave the recorder witness their true category invaluable. Anyway, it's a comfort to assume that many of the ethical violations, and many others, degradation and shame of journalism today, not always for immorality, but for lack of professional domain.
Perhaps the plight of the faculties of social communication is that they teach many useful things for the office, but very little of the trade itself. Clear that they persist in their humanities programs, though less ambitious and urgent, to contribute to the cultural base that students are not high school. But all the training must be based on three pillars teachers: the priority skills and vocations, the certainty that the investigation is not a specialty of the office but the entire investigative journalism should be by definition, and the realization that ethics is not an occasional condition but must always accompany journalism like the drone to fly.
The ultimate goal should be the return to primary education through workshops in small groups with a critical use of historical experiences, and in its original context of public service. Ie learning to rescue the spirit of the party of five in the afternoon.
A group of independent journalists are trying to do for all of Latin America from Cartagena de Indias, with an experimental system and mobile workshops named nothing modest Foundation for New Latin American Journalism. It is a pilot with new journalists to work on a specific specialty - reporting, editing, radio and television interviews, and many others - under the leadership of a veteran of the trade.
In response to a public call for the Foundation, the candidates are nominated by the environment in which they work, which bears the costs of travel, accommodation and registration. Must be less than thirty years, have a minimum of three and prove his fitness and the degree of mastery of his field samples that they consider their best and worst work.
The duration of each workshop depends on the availability of guest teacher - that can sometimes be little more than a week - and does not seek to enlighten their workshops with academic theoretical dogmas and prejudices, but foguearlos roundtable with practical exercises to try to convey their experiences in the carpentry trade. Now the purpose is not to teach to be journalists, but to improve the practice to which they already are. No testing is done and final evaluations or issue diplomas or certificates of any kind: life is responsible for deciding who serves and who does not work.
Three hundred and twenty young journalists from eleven countries have participated in twenty-seven workshops in just a year and a half life of the Foundation, led by veterans of ten nationalities. The Alma Guillermoprieto opened with two chronic and reporting workshops. Terry Anderson led another on hazard information, with the assistance of a general of the Armed Forces who rightly pointed out the lines between heroism and suicide. Tomas Eloy Martinez, our most loyal and ruthless accomplice, made an editing workshop and later another of journalism in times of crisis. Phil Bennett made his trends of the press in the United States and Stephen Ferry did on photography. The magnificent and meticulous Horacio Bervitsky Tim Golden explored different areas of investigative journalism, and English Miguel Angel Bastenier led a seminar international journalism and fascinated her workshops with a brilliant critical analysis of the European press. One of managers
against writers had very positive results, and dream of next year hold a massive exchange of experiences between publishers Sunday editions of half the world. I have made myself several times into the temptation to convince the workshop participants that a masterful story the press can ennoble the germ diaphanous poetry.
The benefits reaped so far are not easy to assess from a pedagogical point of view, but encouraging signs we consider the growing enthusiasm of workshop, already a ferment multiplier creative dissent and subversion within its means, shared many cases by their directives. The mere fact of making twenty journalists from different countries gather to converse on the job five days is an achievement for them and for journalism. For the final analysis we are not proposing a new way to teach it, but trying to come up again the old way of learning.
The media would do well to support this operation rescue. Either in their newsrooms, or purpose-built scenarios, such as flight simulators that reproduce all the incidents of the flight so that students learn to overcome the disasters before they actually find them crossed in life. Well, journalism is an insatiable passion that can only digest and humanized by his confrontation with stark reality. Nobody who has not suffered from this servitude can imagine that feeds on the unpredictability of life. Nobody who has lived it can not even conceive what is the heartbeat of supernatural story, the climax of the scoop, the demolition moral failure. Anyone not born for this and is willing to live alone for that would persist in a trade so incomprehensible and voracious, whose work ends after each story, like forever, but that does not give a moment's peace until he starts again with more zeal than ever in the next minute.
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