In March, PWN Publishers and the Biblioteka Gazety Wyborczej will publish Ryszard Kapuściński’s new book “The Five Senses of the Journalist. This Is Not a Job for Cynics.” It contains a transcript of the workshops Ryszard Kapuściński ran for journalists from Latin America in 2000–2002, as well as three lectures he delivered in Italy in 1994 and 1999. These texts have never before appeared in the Polish language and are being made available to Polish readers for the first time. We recommend their reading to all those concerned about the state of our media and journalism, which is being destroyed by political manipulation. For readers of Studio Opinii we have selected two excerpts from Ryszard Kapuściński’s newest book.

Ishmael Sails On

Journalism is experiencing the effects of the electronic revolution. New technologies enormously facilitate our work, but they will not do it for us. All the problems of our profession, the demands relating to skill and craft, remain unchanged. Inventions and technological progress can help us, but they will not replace our work, our dedication, our studies, our research and investigations.

Our profession is characterised by several important elements.

The first is the willingness to sacrifice part of oneself. It is a demanding profession. Many are demanding, but ours especially so. We are at work twenty-four hours a day. We cannot close the office at four in the afternoon and do something else. Journalism takes possession of our entire life — but there is no other way to practise this profession. Or rather — to practise it perfectly.

It can be practised at two very different levels.

At the craft level, as happens in ninety per cent of cases, journalism does not differ from the profession of cobbler or gardener. That, however, is the lowest level of this profession.

There is also a higher level, the creative level. This is created by our individual predispositions and ambitions. It requires, however, dedication, the sacrifice of time and soul.

The second element characterising this profession is continuous self-education. There are professions that can be learned at university. One receives a diploma and one’s learning ends there. For the rest of one’s life it suffices to administer the knowledge acquired. In journalism it is otherwise: self-education and uninterrupted study are its conditio sine qua non. Our profession is based on researching and describing the contemporary world, which is in a constant, deep, dynamic, and revolutionary process of change. Day after day we must observe and anticipate what may happen. Educate ourselves and never stop learning. I have many talented friends with whom I began my journalistic work. After a few years they vanished without a trace. They relied on their natural abilities, but in this profession talents burn out very quickly. They did not have the strength to continue practising it.

There is a third important thing: you will not make a fortune from journalism. Many other professions allow one to earn better and faster. Journalism yields no profits. Almost every beginning journalist is a poor person who does not improve his financial situation significantly over the following years. It is a profession with a feudal structure; one advances to higher levels with age and it takes time. I meet many frustrated young journalists who work for a pittance, then lose their jobs and have no chance of finding other employment. All of this is part of our profession. You must be patient and hard-working. Readers, listeners, and viewers quickly recognise the value of our work and just as quickly can ascribe it to a specific name. They know that it guarantees a good product. That is precisely the moment when we become a journalist with a stable position. It is not the editor-in-chief who decides that, but our readers.

However, to reach that position, what is needed is what I have already mentioned: willingness to sacrifice and constant self-education.

Journalists can be divided into two basic categories: subjects and rulers. The latter are our masters; they dictate the rules and decide everything. I have never occupied such a position, but I know that today one does not need to be a journalist in order to manage the media. Most directors and chiefs of large newspapers and television stations are managers who have never worked in this profession.

The situation began to change when, quite recently, the world understood that information is a huge business.

At the beginning of the twentieth century information had two faces. It sought truth, established what had actually happened, informed in order to shape public opinion. For such information, truth was the fundamental value.

The second approach to information was its use as an instrument in political struggle. The press, radio, and television in their beginnings were organs of various parties and political forces, used in the struggle for their particular interests. In nineteenth-century France, Germany, and Italy every party and every larger institution had its newspaper. Information there served not truth but the winning of voters and the defeat of political enemies.

In the second half of the twentieth century, particularly in its last years, after the end of the Cold War, with the electronic and communications revolution, the business world suddenly discovered that truth is no longer important, even political struggle is no longer important. What counts is the attractiveness of information. When therefore we created information-as-attraction, it turned out that it can be sold well. The more attractive the information, the more one can earn from it.

In this way information detached itself from culture and began to float in the air. Whoever has money can seize it, disseminate it, and earn still more. This means that we now live in a completely different information era. This is today’s communications novum.

This is precisely why suddenly at the heads of large television networks are persons who have absolutely nothing to do with journalism — business people, connected with banks, insurance companies, or any other well-funded company. Because information earns money, and very quickly.

There is also another problem. Forty, fifty years ago a young journalist could meet with his editor-in-chief and ask advice on professional matters: how to write, how to make a radio or television report. The chief, usually older, would answer from his experience and give a few good pieces of advice.

Today try going to Mr Turner, who has never been a journalist and rarely reads the press or watches television. He will advise you on nothing, because he has not the slightest idea how this profession should be practised. His aim and principle is not the improvement of our profession, but the increase of his own profits.

For such persons, sharing life with others is meaningless, unnecessary. Their position is built not on journalistic experience but on the position of a money-maker.

For us, journalists working with the human being whose story we are trying to know and understand, personal experience is the foundation of research and investigation. The primary source of a reporter’s knowledge is other people. It is from others that we learn where to go in our searches; they share their opinion and view with us; they interpret the world for us that we are trying to understand and describe.

Journalism does not exist without the human being. Relations with others are an indispensable element of our work. We must know a little about psychology, understand people, know how to talk with them and how to relate to them. (…)

Question from the audience: Before you began travelling in search of topics, were you not, like all of us, at least a little cynical?

RK: With full conviction I answer that journalism cannot be practised by cynics. However, one must distinguish cynicism from caution, scepticism, or realism. Those qualities are absolutely necessary; without them one could not practise this profession. Cynicism is a quality incompatible with journalism. Cynicism is a quality unworthy of a human being, a quality that automatically excludes one from journalism. We are speaking here only of great journalism, because that is the only kind worth engaging in — not the repulsive form of it that we so often encounter today. (…)

Every year more than a hundred journalists are killed; many are imprisoned and tortured. In many countries practising this profession is very dangerous. Whoever decides to practise it and is aware of its price, its risks and suffering, cannot be a cynic. (…)

The Five Senses of the Journalist: To Be, To See, To Hear, To Share, To Think

Fifty years ago the journalist’s profession was perceived entirely differently from today. It was an important profession, playing a significant intellectual and political role. It was practised by a narrow group of persons who commanded society’s respect. The journalist was a known and admired person.

Some of the greatest politicians of the contemporary world began their careers as journalists and were proud of that all their lives. Winston Churchill was a correspondent in Africa before he became one of the most outstanding statesmen of the twentieth century; similarly with writers — one need only mention Ernest Hemingway. These great people always acknowledged that they began with journalism and never ceased to feel themselves journalists. However, in the last two decades this situation has undergone a fundamental change as a result of the enormous transformations that have taken place in the ways of practising this profession.

Contemporary newspaper journalism is merely a fraction of the great world of media. In this sphere, which is moreover in a state of permanent expansion, newspaper journalists occupy little space. Day by day the number of people employed in audiovisual media, especially in television, grows. They are described by the term media workers.

Unlike the journalist of half a century ago, such a worker is an anonymous person. No one knows him; no one knows who he is. This stems from the fundamental change that has occurred in the character of his work: the final product generated by the media worker is not his authorial work but the result of the actions of a whole chain of intermediaries, participating like him in the process of creating information. Over every news item broadcast by CNN, 30 or 40 anonymous persons work; such a legion of people participates in the production process that it is impossible to identify the author of the material in its final form as seen on the television screen.

The consequence of this state of affairs is the loss of something so important in this profession as the sense of pride in the personal stamp impressed on our work — a sense of pride that also entailed the journalist’s responsibility for what he does: the person who signs a text with his name and surname feels responsible for his words. Meanwhile in television and large multimedia networks, as in factories, that individual responsibility no longer exists.

On the other hand, the role of the media in the twenty-first century will undoubtedly grow. Young journalists now trying their hand in this small patch of the written press will have to operate in a society in which our function will gain in importance for two reasons: first, because it is a profession through which public opinion can be manipulated; second, because the mechanisms of the media create a virtual world that replaces the real world. (…)

source: kapuscinski.info