What makes a journalist? A lot of people \u2013 inside and outside the profession \u2013 are asking that question. If you think it takes a genius, think again. Good journalists have a representative of their audience in mind who informs every step of their work. My background\u2019s print, so it\u2019s natural for me to refer to a reader. Who\u2019s your reader, a genius or an idiot?<\/strong><\/p>\nMy first Editor was also my dad which means I spent a good deal of my career wondering if I was a journalist at all. I certainly didn\u2019t feel I really was until I was a newspaper reporter, but that was later.<\/p>\n
In 1980 I finished high school in Brisbane and went back to Hong Kong to plot my next move.<\/p>\n
When I\u2019d left, Bax had a talkback show on Commercial Radio (that\u2019s how small the market was \u2013 that was the name of the station) and was filling in the rest of his time with a little computer magazine he\u2019d started.<\/p>\n
By the time I returned Computer-Asia had grown enough to warrant all his attention. It was still a tiny operation, running out of a backroom behind the Hong Kong Press Club in Wanchai. There was Bax, John the ad sales guy and Teresa the paste-up artist.<\/p>\n
I had pitched up in the middle of the mad rush which happened once a month to get the magazine to bed and Bax dragged me, still jetlagged, the very next day to help out.<\/p>\n
I didn\u2019t contribute much I\u2019m sure but it was a great introduction to the swirling excitement of deadlines and the dead calm at the centre, where evey line must be carefully checked first for spelling and punctuation and then again for meaning.<\/p>\n
The operation was so small and so tight for cash our final job was to stick the subscriber copies into envelopes as soon as they arrived back from the printer and make sure it was at the front of every newsstand we passed on the way home.<\/p>\n
Bax, recognising the value of cheap labour, asked me to stay. But, I told him, I don\u2019t know anything about computers.<\/p>\n
\u201cNeither do I,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd nor do most of our readers. Our job is to explain it to them.\u201d<\/p>\n
Bax told me we were writing for the business people who knew this stuff was important but didn\u2019t have the first idea what it meant.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur reader\u2019s probably a middle-aged guy in the middle of a middle-sized company whose boss is either about to invest in computing or has just done so.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe\u2019s got these weird new people with weird new titles talking a language he can\u2019t understand telling him he\u2019s got to do things differently.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe doesn\u2019t want to look like an idiot to his boss but he\u2019s not convinced any of this stuff is going to help him do his job better.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s your reader. You get to talk to the experts. Go and ask them the things that guy needs to know.\u201d<\/p>\n
I pointed out the obvious truth that Computer-Asia was also read by computer experts, to whom I would rightly appear the most wretched fool.<\/p>\n
Which is when Bax introduced me to the great paradox at the heart of journalism, that of the genius and the idiot.<\/p>\n
Basically, it doesn\u2019t matter what your subject is, you have to write for both the guy who knows nothing about it and the guy who knows just about everything.<\/p>\n
\u201cOh, and he\u2019s in a hurry so you\u2019d better make it worth his while to stop and read what you\u2019ve got to say.<\/p>\n
\u201cDon\u2019t worry about the genius. You\u2019ll meet lots of those and once you learn a bit of the jargon it\u2019ll be easy to think you\u2019re a genius too.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019re not. You\u2019re an idiot. You\u2019re there on behalf of all the other idiots, going where they can\u2019t easily go and asking the questions they would ask if they had the opportunity.<\/p>\n
\u201cDon\u2019t ever stop being an idiot.\u201d<\/p>\n
And here\u2019s the thing. Every day we met our genius readers. We hosted annual golf tournaments for them, met them in our daily rounds and received by turn their congratulatory slaps on the back and pointed figures of abuse.<\/p>\n
Our genius readers were the computer managers who were running the mainframes in the big companies (they were all big companies then), and the salespeople from the big companies (and they too were all big companies then) who made the things.<\/p>\n
In those days all the geniuses spent a lot of time telling us and each other that the new microcomputers would never amount to anything serious.<\/p>\n
Bax was such an idiot he started Micro-Asia two years later, in the days of the Sinclair ZX80 and its magnificent eight bits. He backed \u2018microcomputer\u2019 over \u2018PC\u2019 but that was about the only thing he got wrong \u2013 what we\u2019d eventually call these things.<\/p>\n
He was such an idiot he asked Steve Jobs a really dumb question at the launch of the Macintosh about touchscreen technology which earned a sneer from the Great Man.<\/p>\n
\u201cListen to me,\u201d he snapped and everyone in the room froze. \u201cThe mouse is the pointing device for the rest of this century. Nothing else will have a look in.\u201d<\/p>\n
That\u2019s how it was reported by David Frith in his obituary of Jobs for\u00a0The Australian<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\nSo I learned early the value of being an idiot with a few dumb questions, the sort of questions any idiot would ask if they had the chance.<\/p>\n
But back in those days there was a huge divide between journalist and audience. That\u2019s been smashed and in the ensuing chaos it\u2019s not unusual to stumble upon the existential question: What makes a journalist?<\/p>\n
If it\u2019s just being an idiot then our numbers are now legion, as the coverage of the Boston bombings made clear, with many journalists performing no better than ordinary citizens.<\/p>\n
When it comes to accurate reporting it may be we are all just ill-informed idiots now.<\/p>\n
And yet, we recognise the difference when we see it. It\u2019s the pretty obvious difference between \u201cOMG A BOMB!\u201d and \u201cThere are unverified reports of an explosion. Stay tuned for updates\u201d.<\/p>\n
What makes a journalist? Now, more than ever, the relationship with the audience \u2013 the mythical middle manager, the person trying to make ends meet, the person who was described in a different age as the \u201cman on the omnibus,\u201d the idiot.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s it. Be an idiot, ask the dumb questions any idiot would ask.<\/p>\n
But, never, ever treat the audience like fools. Not if you want to be a real journalist.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By\u00a0Sally\u00a0Baxter May 19, 2013 What makes a journalist? A lot of people \u2013 inside and outside the profession \u2013 are asking that question. If you think it takes a genius, think again. Good journalists have a representative of their audience in mind who informs every step of their work. My background\u2019s print, so it\u2019s natural […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[3434,21,1106,26,27,1441,1440,32,42],"tags":[2561,571,2580],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3t0mw-13s","jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4058"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4058"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4058\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4058"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4058"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4058"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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