There are questions that become harder to answer the longer you live with them.
“Why are you a journalist?” is one of them.
Ask a young reporter or a student and you may get a clear answer: to tell the truth, expose corruption, give voice to people who are not heard, defend democracy.
Ask someone who has spent thirty years in journalism and the answer usually becomes less elegant.
Sometimes it is simply: I don’t know what else I would do.
Barçın Yınanç, a Turkish journalist, comes remarkably close to saying exactly that. Looking back at decades in the profession, she writes:
“Why do I continue? Maybe the answer is not that heroic; I continue because I do not know what else to do!”
Then comes an even better diagnosis:
“Once you get the virus of journalism inside you, it never leaves.”
There are worse explanations for a career and perhaps more accurate ones: nobody starts for the same reason
The journalists whose testimonies appear in Why We Tell Stories arrive at journalism through remarkably different doors.
For Getoarbë Mulliqi in Kosovo, journalism was literally part of the furniture of childhood. Her parents were journalists. Their kitchen smelled, she writes, “more of newsprint than bread”, while the sound of typewriters mixed with coffee boiling on the stove.
The kitchen became a newsroom.
During the darkest period in Kosovo, her parents produced the newspaper Kombi. Their home became a place where stories were written while their daughter played under the table. Only later did she understand what was happening above her head. “Journalism was never just a job; it was a duty, an identity, and survival.”
Her mother’s interview with a woman who had survived a massacre gave the child another lesson. Journalism was not simply the transmission of information: “It was about preserving memory, defending dignity, and pursuing justice.”
That is one road into journalism.
Mihail Nesteriuc in Moldova found another. His father was not a professional journalist. He created Facebook pages where residents could complain about illegal dumping, abuses by local authorities and neglected community problems.
People gradually began going to him rather than to journalists.
Nesteriuc writes something devastating: “Although there were journalists in our town, my father’s Facebook pages became the only real media.”
His question as a young man was wonderfully naive: Why weren’t the journalists doing what journalists were supposed to do?
His father’s answer was less naive: local journalists and local power were tied together. Indignation did the rest.
He wanted to become a journalist.
So, journalism can begin with admiration for journalism, but it can also begin with disappointment in journalism.
Sometimes it starts because journalism looks cool
Kristina Atovska in North Macedonia imagined herself as a child reporting from wars and protests, microphone in hand.
Barçın Yınanç’s beginning was even less heroic. At 16 she saw an American television series set in a newsroom: “Journalism looked dynamic and cool.”
That was enough, no defence of democracy, no constitutional theory, no Walter Lippmann. Just a tv programme.
There is something reassuring about that. We have constructed such an enormous mythology around journalism that sometimes we forget journalists are human beings. They don’t all enter a newsroom carrying Thomas Jefferson under one arm and a code of ethics under the other.
Some are curious, some are angry, some like writing, some want adventure, some want to change the world, some simply want to know what is happening.
The meaning often comes afterwards, usually when something happens
Atovska eventually went to Ukraine. She entered Kyiv while it was surrounded, travelled to Bucha just after Russian forces withdrew, then continued towards Kharkiv and the front.
She describes death, destruction and moments when she wondered whether she would survive.
What justified the risk?
“The hope I saw in people’s eyes when they spoke to journalists made the risks worthwhile.”
There may be no better explanation of reporting.
Somebody has experienced something, somebody else needs to know.
Between them stands a journalist.
Where is the hero
Many of the contributors describe journalism as a calling, a mission, a fight.
Journalists are described as watchdogs, defenders of democracy, voices of the unheard, people standing on the right side of history.
I understand every one of these sentiments, but I am slightly suspicious whenever journalists begin describing themselves as heroes.
Our job is important enough without canonising ourselves.
A journalist can believe deeply in democracy, freedom, human dignity and the rule of law. But the journalist’s distinctive contribution is something slightly less glamorous.
To look, to ask, to verify, to doubt (if your mother says: I love you, doubt - Walter Lipman)...and, of course to tell.
Including when what we discover contradicts what we hoped to discover. That is the difficult part.
***
After decades in this profession, perhaps I would no longer answer “Why journalism?” with a grand declaration.
I would say this: because there is always something I don’t know, because somebody powerful would prefer that I didn’t ask, because somebody powerless desperately wants somebody to ask, because sometimes everybody knows something, but nobody has proved it, because sometimes everybody believes something, and it isn’t true.
And because every now and then, after all the noise, deadlines, mistakes, attacks, absurd working hours and questionable salaries, you discover something that matters.
Atovska calls journalism “a passion, a character, a drive, a calling, a way of life.” Yınanç calls it a virus. Perhaps both are right.
But my favourite answer comes indirectly from another contributor, Božidar Milovsc: we are the irrational answer to a rational question.”
Why am I a journalist?
After all these years, perhaps the most accurate answer is embarrassingly simple.
Because tomorrow morning there will still be something I want to know and as Christoph Plate put it: because I allowed to be inspired by writers who choose to be journalist and who have a story to tell".
Read the E-Book of “Why we tell stories” here.