Fellow Travelers

Author: Donald Morrison
Source: Time Magazine, June 7, 2007

Editorial summary by kapuscinski.info. The text below is a summary based on the original article. The full article is available in the Time Magazine archive.

An article published five months after Kapuscinski’s death, placing him within the broader tradition of travelling journalists who shaped how Western societies understood the Third World in the twentieth century.

Morrison — for many years Time’s culture editor — sets Kapuscinski alongside figures such as Tiziano Terzani and Martha Gellhorn as a representative of a vanishing species: the journalist who spends years coming to know one place or one subject rather than hopping between events.

The piece starts from the observation that Kapuscinski’s death coincided with a crisis of the traditional foreign correspondent: newsroom cutbacks, the dominance of the internet, the fragmentation of the reader’s attention. Against that background Kapuscinski becomes the emblem of a model of journalism that may not return — one built on months in the field, on relationships, and on patient searching for the deeper sense of events.

Morrison quotes other well-known figures in the media who name Kapuscinski among the largest influences on their own craft.