In those days the paper divided into three large sections: news, feature articles and special reports, and editorial notes. The most difficult and prestigious was editorial. The most inauspicious position was that of reporter, which suggested both an apprentice and a hod carrier. Time and the job itself have shown that the nervous system of journalism in fact circulates counterclockwise. I can confirm this: at the age of nineteen — being the worst student in law school — I began my career subediting editorial notes and, little by little, by working very hard, I climbed ladders in the different sections until I reached the highest rung of common reporter.
Just doing the job imposed the need for developing a cultural foundation, and the atmosphere of the job took care of fostering it. Reading was an occupational addiction. Autodidacts tend to be avid, fast readers, and those of us from that time carried those tendencies to extremes in order to keep making our way in life towards the best job in the world, as we ourselves called it. Alberto Lleras Camargo, who was always a journalist, and president of Colombia twice, didn’t even have a secondary-school diploma.
The subsequent creation of schools of journalism was a pedagogical reaction to the accomplished fact that the job lacked academic endorsement. Now they’re no longer just for the written press, but for all media invented and still to be invented.
Yet in their expansion they took away even the humble name the job has had since its origins in the fifteenth century, and now it’s called not journalism but communication sciences or social communication. The result, in general, isn’t encouraging. The young people who leave the academies full of dreams, their lives ahead of them, seem disconnected from reality and its vital problems, and a zeal for prominence takes priority over one’s vocation and innate aptitudes. And over the two most important qualifications in particular: creativity and skill.
Most graduates arrive with flagrant deficiencies: they have serious problems in grammar and spelling and difficulties in having a responsive understanding of texts. Some boast that they can read a secret document on a minister’s desk upside down, record casual conversations without the other person’s knowledge, or make use in an article of a conversation they had agreed would be confidential. The most serious issue is that these ethical violations obey an audacious notion of the job, consciously adopted and proudly based on the sanctification of being first at any cost and above all else. Some graduates are not moved by the basic principle that the superior news article isn’t always the first one turned in but is often the best one. Some, aware of their deficiencies, feel cheated by school and do not hesitate to blame their teachers for not having inculcated the virtues that are now demanded of them, in particular a curiosity about life.
It is true that these criticisms hold for education in general, perverted by the ‘massification’ of schools that follow the debased policy of informing instead of forming. But in the specific case of journalism, it also seems that the job didn’t manage to evolve at the same speed as its tools, and journalists became lost in the labyrinth of a technology hurtling without control into the future. In other words, companies have engaged wholeheartedly in a fierce competition for material modernization and have left for later the formation of their foot soldiers and the participatory procedures that strengthened a professional spirit in the past. Editorial rooms are aseptic laboratories for solitary navigators, where it seems easier to communicate with the phenomena of space than with the hearts of readers. Dehumanization runs amok.
It isn’t easy to understand that the technological splendour and communications vertigo that we longed for in our day have only anticipated and worsened the daily agony of press time. Beginners complain that editors allow three hours for a job that at the moment of truth is impossible in less than six, order them to write enough material for two columns and at the hour of truth assign them only half a column, and in the panic of press time, no one has the time or inclination to explain why, let alone offer a word of consolation. ‘They don’t even curse at us,’ says a novice reporter yearning for direct communication with his superiors. Nothing: the editor who once had been a wise, compassionate father barely has the energy and time himself to survive the galley slavery of technology.
I believe it is undue haste and space limitations that have minimized feature writing, which we always considered the star genre, but it is also the one that requires more time, more research, more reflection, and a sure knowledge of the art of writing. It is, in fact, the meticulous, truthful reconstitution of an event. In other words: the complete news item, just as it really happened, so that the reader knows it as well as if he’d been there, in the place where the events occurred.
Before the teletype and the telex were invented, a radio operator with a martyr’s vocation captured in mid-flight the news of the world in sidereal whistles, and an erudite subeditor completed them with details and antecedents, just as the entire skeleton of a dinosaur is reconstructed on the basis of a single vertebra. Only interpretation was forbidden, because that was the sacred domain of the managing editor, whose editorials, it was assumed, were written out by him, even if they weren’t, and almost always in a hand famous for its inscrutability. Historic managing editors had personal linotypists to decipher them.
An important advance over this half-century is that now there is commentary and opinion in news articles and feature writing, and editorials are enriched with informative data. The results, however, don’t appear to be the very best, for this profession has never been as dangerous as it is now. The excessive use of quotations and false or true statements permits innocent or deliberate mistakes, vicious manipulations, and venomous misrepresentations that give the news article the dimensions of a deadly weapon. Citations of sources that deserve full credit, of generally well-informed people, or high-placed officials who requested anonymity, or observers who know everything and whom no one sees, shelter all kinds of offences that go unpunished. But the one responsible takes refuge in the right not to reveal his source, not asking whether he himself isn’t an easy tool of the source who passed on information however he chose, arranged however it suited him best.
I think he is: the bad journalist thinks the source is his very life — above all, if it is official — and for that reason he sanctifies it, pampers it, protects it, and eventually establishes a dangerous complicit relationship that even leads him to underrate the integrity of a second source.
Even at the risk of being too anecdotal, I believe there is another guilty party in this drama: the tape recorder. Before it was invented, the profession got along very well with three tools that really were only one: a notebook, unswerving ethics, and two ears that we reporters still used to hear what people said to us. The professional, ethical management of the tape recorder has not yet been invented. Someone would have to teach our young colleagues that the cassette isn’t a substitute for memory but a development of the humble notebook that gave such good service in the early days of the job. The tape recorder hears but doesn’t listen, it repeats — like a digital parrot — but doesn’t think, is faithful but has no heart, and, in the long run, its literal version will not be as trustworthy as that of somebody who pays attention to the living words of his interlocutor, evaluates them with his intelligence, and assesses them with his morality. For the radio it has the enormous advantage of literalness and immediacy, but many interviewers don’t listen to the answers because they’re thinking about the next question.
The tape recorder is responsible for the relentless expansion of the interview. Radio and television, by their very nature, transformed it into the supreme genre, but the written press also seems to share the mistaken idea that the voice of truth is not so much that of the journalist who has seen as that of the interviewee who has stated. For many subeditors on newspapers, transcription is the trial by fire: they confuse the sound of words, stumble over semantics, founder on the rocks of spelling, and die of an infarction of syntax. Perhaps the solution is to return to
the poor notebook so that the journalist keeps editing with his intelligence as he listens, and leave the tape recorder to its true position as invaluable witness. In any case, it is a consolation to suppose that many of the ethical and other transgressions that debase and embarrass today’s journalism are not always because of immorality but are also due to a lack of professional mastery.
Perhaps the misfortune of the schools of social communication is that they teach many things useful to the job but very little about the job itself. Of course, they ought to continue with their humanities programmes, but make them less ambitious and peremptory, in order to contribute to the cultural base the students don’t bring with them from secondary school. But all the training should rest on three central pillars: the priority of aptitudes and vocations, the certainty that investigation is not a professional speciality but that all journalism should, by definition, be investigative, and the awareness that ethics are not an occasional condition but should always accompany journalism like the buzz accompanies the blowfly.
The final objective should be a return to the primary system of teaching journalism by means of practical workshops in small groups, making critical use of historical experience within its original frame of public service. In other words: rescuing for apprentices the spirit of the five o’clock get-together.
We, a group of independent journalists, are trying to do this for all of Latin America from Cartagena de Indias, with a system of experimental, travelling workshops that bears the immodest name of Foundation for a New Ibero-American Journalism. It is a pilot experiment in which new journalists work on a particular speciality — feature writing, editing, radio and television interviews, and many others — under the direction of a veteran reporter.
In response to a public announcement by the foundation, candidates are proposed by the medium in which they work, which is responsible for the costs of their travel, lodging, and fees. They should be younger than thirty, have a minimum of three years’ experience, and vouch for their aptitude in and degree of knowledge of their speciality with samples that they themselves consider their best and worst work. The duration of each workshop depends on the availability of the invited instructor — which rarely can be more than a week — who does not attempt to instruct the participants with theoretical dogmas and academic prejudices but to strengthen them at the round table by means of practical exercises, attempting to pass on his or her experiences in the carpentry of the job. For the purpose is not to teach them to be journalists but to improve through practice those who already are. There are no final examinations or evaluations, and no diplomas or certificates of any kind are issued: life will take care of deciding who is suitable and who is not.
Three hundred and twenty young journalists from eleven countries have participated in twenty-seven workshops in only a year and a half since the creation of the foundation, led by veterans of ten nationalities. Alma Guillermoprieto inaugurated the project with two workshops on feature writing and reporting. Terry Anderson led another on information in dangerous situations, with the cooperation of a general of the armed forces, who pointed out very clearly the line between heroism and suicide. Tomás Eloy Martínez, our most faithful and combative collaborator, gave a workshop on editing and then another on journalism in times of crisis. Phil Bennett gave his on tendencies of the press in the United States, and Stephen Ferry did his on photography. The magnificent Horacio Verbitsky and the meticulous Tim Golden explored different areas of investigative journalism, and the Spaniard Miguel Ángel Bastenier led a seminar on international journalism and fascinated the participants with a brilliant critical analysis of the European press.
One workshop between managing editors and subeditors had very positive results, and next year we dream of convening a massive exchange of Sunday edition experiences among editors from all around the world. I myself have succumbed several times to the temptation of persuading workshop participants that an authoritative feature can ennoble the press with translucent nuggets of poetry.
The benefits garnered so far are not easy to evaluate from a pedagogical point of view, but we take as encouraging symptoms the growing enthusiasm of the workshop participants, who are already a swelling leaven of non-conformity and creative subversion within their media, shared in many cases with their management. The mere fact of arranging for twenty journalists from different countries to meet and talk for five days about the job is an achievement for them and for the job. For, in the long run, we are not proposing a new way of teaching journalism but trying to reinvent the old way of learning it.
The media would do well to support this rescue operation, whether in their editorial rooms or with intentionally constructed scenarios, like simulators that reproduce all the incidents of a flight so that students learn to avoid disasters before encountering them in real life. For journalism is an insatiable passion that can only be endured and humanized by its naked confrontation with reality. No one who has not suffered it can imagine this servitude that feeds on the unexpected in life. No one who has not experienced it can even conceive of the supernatural throbbing of the news, the orgasm of breaking a story, the moral devastation of failure. No one who has not been born for it and is not prepared to live for it alone could continue in so incomprehensible and voracious a job, whose work ends after each news report as if it were forever but that does not grant a moment’s peace until in the next minute it begins all over again more ardently than before.
A BOTTLE IN THE OCEAN FOR THE GOD OF WORDS
Zacatecas, Mexico, April 7, 1997
When I was twelve I was almost run down by a bicycle. A passing priest saved me with a shout: ‘Watch out!’ The cyclist fell to the ground. The priest, without stopping, said to me: ‘Now do you see the power of the word?’ That day I found out. Now we also know that the Maya peoples had known it since the time of Christ, and with so much precision that they had a special god of words.
That power has never been as great as it is today. Humanity will enter the third millennium under the sway of words. It isn’t true that the image is displacing them or can annihilate them. On the contrary, it is empowering them: there have never been so many words in the world with so much scope, authority, and volition as in the immense Babel of life today. Words invented, mistreated, or sanctified by the press, by throw-away books, by advertising posters: spoken and sung on the radio, on television, in films, on the phone, on loudspeakers; shouted with a broad brush on the walls of buildings or whispered in the ear in the penumbra of love. No, what has been routed is silence. Things now have so many names in so many languages that it is no longer easy to know what they are called in any of them. Languages scatter, out of control, they mingle and mix together, dashing blindly towards the ineluctable destiny of a global vernacular.
The Spanish language has to be prepared for a great cycle in that future without frontiers. It is a historical right. Not because of its economic influence, like other languages until today, but because of its vitality, its creative dynamism, its vast cultural experience, the rapidity and strength of its expansion in its own sphere of 19 million square kilometres and 400 million speakers by the end of the century. A teacher of Hispanic literature in the United States has said, and with reason, that his time in class is spent serving as an interpreter for Latin Americans from different countries. It is surprising that the verb pasar has fifty-four meanings, while in the Republic of Ecuador the male sexual organ has 105 names but the word condoliente, which is self-explanatory and which we have so much need of, has not yet been invented. A young French journalist is overwhelmed by the poetic discoveries he finds everywhere in our domestic life. That a child, kept awake by the sad, intermittent bleat of a lamb, said: ‘It sounds like a lighthouse.’ That a food seller in Colombian Guajira turned down a brew of lemon balm because it tasted of Good Friday. That Don Sebastián de Covarrubias, in his memorable dictionary, wrote for us in his own hand that yellow is the colour of lovers. How many times haven�
�t we had coffee that tastes of window, bread that tastes of corner, cherries that taste of kiss? These are positive proofs of the intelligence of a language that for some time has been bursting at the seams. Yet our contribution should not be controlling it but, on the contrary, freeing it from its normative shackles so that it can enter the twenty-first century as if it owned the place.
In that sense, I would dare to suggest to this learned audience that we simplify grammar before grammar ends up simplifying us. Let us humanize its rules, let us learn from the indigenous languages to which we owe so much and that still have a great deal with which to teach and enrich us, let us assimilate quickly and thoroughly technical and scientific neologisms before they seep in undigested, let us negotiate wholeheartedly with barbaric gerunds, endemic thats, the parasitic ofwhichism, and return to the present subjunctive the splendour of its anapaests: váyamos instead of vayamos, cántemos instead of cantemos, or the harmonious muéramos instead of the sinister muramos. Let us retire orthography, the terror of human beings from the cradle: let us bury the H written on the walls of caves, sign a boundary treaty between G and J, and be more rational about written accent marks, since, after all, no one is going to read lagrima [he cries] where it says lágrima [tear], or confuse revolver [to turn over] with revólver [revolver]. And what about our b-burro and our v-vaca, which our Spanish grandparents brought to us as if they were two when there’s always one too many?
These are random questions, of course, like bottles thrown into the sea in the hope they reach the god of words. Unless, because of these audacious and foolish words, he and all of us end up lamenting, with reason and fairness, that the providential bicycle when I was twelve didn’t run me down in time.
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