Scurt manual de jurnalism (de C.J. Chivers)
În 2006, C.J. Chivers, pe atunci corespondentul New York Times la Moscova, a scris un articol în Esquire numit “The School”. N-am să uit niciodată cum m-am făcut mic pe canapea în timp ce el povestea cu precizie matematică ce s-a întâmplat în școala din Beslan, unde în 2004 un grup de teroriști ceceni au luat peste 1,000 de ostatici. Articolul lui Chivers a câștigat o mulțime de premii, iar anul trecut, a fost ales de Esquire printre cele mai bune șapte texte pe care le-au publicat vreodată.
Acum două zile, Gabi mi-a semnalat un interviu cu Chivers care a apărut în iulie 2005 pe mediabistro. Chivers povestește despre cum s-a apucat de jurnalism la 29 de ani, despre cum a ajuns la NY Times, despre pescuit și despre viață. Spre final, întrebat ce sfaturi are de dat altor reporteri, Chivers dă un răspuns lung, pe care am să-l reproduc integral pentru că e una din cele mai succinte și limpezi lecții de jurnalism pe care le-am citit vreodată:
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I’m not much on advice, but I’ll say this. There is no secret to it. What we do is rooted in fundamentals. Take my job covering Russia. It’s not a lot different from covering a town, a city hall, a state legislature or a murder. By that I mean that, yes, okay, the lifestyle is different, and the languages are not English, and the cultures are different, but no matter these external differences, the bones of the job are the same. Every day, whether the subject you are after is familiar or unfamiliar, you go around or call around or email around and ask people to tell you what they know, what they saw, what they heard, what they think. You ask them why any of it is important or interesting. You ask them to tell you how they know what they’re telling you. And you ask them to tell you what they don’t know, what they didn’t see, what they didn’t hear, so you can establish the limits of their knowledge. You ask them if there is anyone else you should be talking to and how to be in touch with them. You ask them if there is corroborating material to what they say. Documents? Video? Tape? Transcript? Other witnesses or participants or victims or victors? You ask them what’s the best resource out there for understanding the thing you think you’re writing about. (It might be an old lawsuit, or a union contract, a book of regulations, a copy of a budget or a medical record; it might be a poem or a local historian or archivist. It could be a family photo album. It could be anything. It could be many things. But there is usually something.)
If you don’t know them already, you say: How do you spell your name? What’s your date of birth? Where are you from? What’s your job? What’s your phone number and email address so I can check up on this on deadline if I’m going to use it? There are variations on this, of course, ways to keep pressure on people who need the pressure, to show you can see fishhooks in the bait and that you have no tolerance for error; there is no time today to list them all, and you get the idea.
Then, no matter how the interview went, you thank them.
Then, when you have done enough of this that you feel solid about what you’ve got, you go back to your laptop, think it through, back check it, talk it over with your editors, write it up, trim 10 or 15 or 25 percent so it’s tighter, fact-check it and email it to the desk.
Then you get edited, maybe for a few hours, maybe for a few weeks, but eventually it’s done to your desk’s satisfaction, and it drops. Then you begin the next chase. That’s what we do.
When we’re not doing that we’re reading everything we can get our hands on, studying, or calling around the sources trying to get traction, looking for the next story or a referral to the next source. It’s not like doing brain surgery. It’s just plain work. There is no advice except the obvious: work harder than you want to. Then get lucky. And enjoy it, although sometimes we get exhausted enough that we forget that.
Other than that I’d tell anyone who was still young enough to join the Marines. Or the Peace Corps. Or an NGO. Or be a banker or a nurse. Take out a loan and open a shop. Work on a haul seiner. Wrench cars. Paint houses. Paint nails. Teach school. Chase your hobbies, and go wherever you can get and read anything good you can find. Do something, anything, different from the usual route to a notebook and a press pass. Get away from the university and the newsroom while you can. Journalism will still be here when you get done.
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Excelent. Cel putin, pentru mine…e excelent :).