What does it mean to be a great journalist?

Talking from the wide perspective, nowadays, almost everyone has an opportunity to try to be a non-professional journalist and it looks like easy, quickly and interesting hobby when sometimes you can even win fame. BUT such media, when everyone can practise their skills of journalism, isn't professional and worth to trust. Traditional journalists make mistakes as well. So, what does it mean today to be a great journalist?

We can mention Carl Berstein, a professional and experienced American investigate journalist and author, who gave several proper tips about being a great journalist. 

   

Having fun from journalistic work

First of all, C. Berstein think that the main thing is to find something that gives you joy doing it. He says that the most fun years of his life perhaps in many regards were age 16 to 20 at The Washington Star. He feels happy learning and becoming a reporter very young. But when Carl talks about today‘s journalism, he mentions that it’s very difficult for a young person to get the kind of notice because there’s so many people involved in what’s called journalism today and as there are fewer and fewer major sources of information that draw disproportionate attention. And he thinks that there’s a dilution and it’s harder to get noticed because readers go to more places and it was easier for individual journalists to get noticed 30-40 years ago. But an important thing is to have fun from doing journalism, no matter, how old are you. You are examining the human condition and that should be fun.

Journalist should be a good listener

According to Carl Berstein, it is necessary for journalists to be a good listeners and a lot of nowadays journalists tend to be very bad listeners. “Reporters ran in with microphones and stuck them in people’s faces with the object of sound bytes really for the purpose of manufacturing controversy.  The real purpose of reporting, of journalism is to illuminate what is real, you know, real existential truth”. Therefore, journalism should not be sensationalism or manufactured controversy – it should be context and listening. “Almost all the good stories that I have ever done, I’ve had a preconceived notion of what the story might be, and my preconceived notion has always turned out to be wrong; from Watergate to anything else that I’ve done”. Berstein says that it’s good to have that preconceived notion to maybe ask some questions, but then journalists must give people the chance to answer those questions and don’t hammer them with your preconceived notion. So, listening is something that journalist must know.

To look at how most of the people live

And the last aspect about being a great journalist, is that journalists could not exaggerate one aspect of our culture. For example “the sensational, fame… most people aren’t famous, yet there’s this great desire in our culture for fame, which is an important thing to write about.  And to look at, but at the same time, we need to look at how most people live,” said American’s journalist. Actually, we need to look at what’s really going among human beings and the institutions that they interact with, we need to look at every situation deeper by using our analytical mind.

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