What kind of a person is a journalist?
Last session we had a look at the life of journalists and especially the obstacles and difficulties they have to face every day. The question that interested me the most regarding this topic was the following: What kind of person do you need be to in order to be a good journalist?
First of all, it is important to consider that a journalist’s job is a hard one. What I intend is, that often they earn little money but work for many hours a day. In order to endure this, a journalist needs to be passionate about his oder her job. A journalist therefore needs to be ambitious and eager and able to face challenges that change on a daily basis. There is no work day that compares to the others, it is kind of exciting to not know in the morning what the day might bring. That makes it necessary for a journalist to be a spontaneous and flexible person.
Over and over again, journalists are asked to be creative heads, that means to come up with new but also interesting stories. That sometimes leads to hours of researching, analysing and thinking. That is why journalists need to be industrious and come up with strategies to find a topic for the next article or to have people informing them about current and on-going events. This is also the reason why networking and their contact book are so important for journalists. Being dependent on different sources for information, a journalist needs to be a sociable, in other cases maybe even demanding and brash, person.
Not in the last place a journalist needs to be a good and eloquent writer, not only being aware of rules of interpunction and orthography, but most of all choosing the right tone and structure for the text in a way that makes it appealing and interesting for the audience to read.
Me personally I am totally not the kind of person who is suitable for this kind of job (Maybe you have to be born for this job?). The more I appreciate the work the journalists do. I guess we should be thankful to these people standing daily stress and enduring pressure to keep us informed and up-to-date.
