To future ‘observers of the world’
HOW many young people today want to become journalists or writers?
How many will, despite parental attempts to steer them toward more lucrative professions, become one? These questions come to mind whenever I seize the chance to talk to teenagers and children about why I work as a journalist or what they can do to pick up journalistic skills. Yesterday was no different.
They were an articulate, inquisitive bunch, raising new questions before I could recover from answering the one before. Have you or your co-workers ever written anything that got you in trouble? (Yes, if getting sued for libel counts as trouble. We are thankful not to have had anyone convicted, so far.) How do you fix writer’s block? (You break the writing process down into five steps, which makes it easier.)
Has anyone ever said anything mean about something you wrote? (Oh, yes. Some people can get pretty mean on social media.)
These question-and-answer sessions can drain one’s energy, but the fatigue that follows is the good kind. They also remind us that passing along journalism skills goes beyond teaching a child to write, to illustrate or to take photographs.
The quality we must try to nurture is curiosity, which doesn’t always survive from childhood into adulthood. In some cases, the death of curiosity starts at home, when frazzled adults grow tired of answering a child’s many and wide-ranging questions. Sometimes it fades in adolescence, when the need to belong and to seem like everyone else sinks its teeth in. On the two to three occasions each year when I accept opportunities to speak with children and teens about journalism or writing, it’s the question-and-answer session I look forward to the most.
For yesterday’s session, the young writers were told to work in small groups and plan three types of articles (news, feature, opinion) about topics they considered important or interesting. They quickly debated one another on how viable these topics were, whether they had enough facts for their stories to rest on. Their plans revealed an awareness of the local news I was pleasantly surprised and impressed by.
One group, however, offered a different (yet no less pleasant) surprise. They had chosen, for their topics, three popular series of books. And in the column reserved for their opinion on the topic, these were their choices: “We expect a lot from this book.” “We want the publishers to produce more copies of these book s.”
“We hope the author will continue to write books.” I want to congratulate their parents and teachers for raising such devoted readers.
Of course, reading makes a difference and should be encouraged. But it’s particularly crucial for children who express an interest in writing or journalism. A journalist who doesn’t read— and read broadly— is like a knife that is kept from a whetstone for too long.
There’s been much handwringing about whether children growing up in this connected age still read, when there’s so much potential distraction from various screens. I am optimistic about children on the privileged side of the digital divide; they will almost certainly be better informed than my generation, I think. As to the children on the other side of that divide, I have to suspend my worries.
But the fact that some in yesterday’s assembly paused to think about an Anderson Cooper quote warms my heart. “A lot of compelling stories in the world aren’t being told,” the broadcast journalist once said, “and the fact that people don’t know about them compounds the suffering.” Whatever form or platform the future of journalism finds itself in, the need for it remains.
We’ll need writers and journalists to dig for and present the information and insight that feed people’s decisions; we’ll need them to write the stories that stimulate debate and sometimes, to our surprise, even lead to solutions.