The other craft

Look beyond the 1982 Nobel Literature prize for novels of haunting beauty that include “One Hundred Years of Solitude” and the still unpublished “We’ll See Each Other in August”. There towers Gabriel García Márquez of Colombia who wrote: “Journalism is the best job in the world”.

“Journalists are lost in a labyrinth of technology madly rushing the profession into the future without any control,” wrote Marquez who died April 17 at his Mexico home. “All journalism must, by definition, be investigative... And awareness of ethics is not merely an occasional condition of the trade, but an integral part, as essentially a part of each other as the buzz and the horsefly.”

Garcia’s first job was with Bogota's El Espectador newspaper, which also published his first short story in 1947, paying him 800 pesos or half a dollar.  Journalism never paid much. “As long as there was whisky, there was no misery," Garcia Marquez quipped.

He owed nine months of rent payments when he penned “One Hundred Years of Solitude”. To send the manuscript to his editor in Argentina his wife pawned a household appliance. Known affectionately as “Gabo”, he founded the Iberian-American New Journalism Foundation in the Colombian port city of Cartagena.  

“One Hundred Years of Solitude” is 47 years old now”, New York Times noted. “And despite its colossal and enduring popularity, its style—magic realism—has largely given way, in Latin America, to other forms of narration, in part as a reaction against the sheer size of García Márquez’s achievement.  

“(Soon) writers in Latin America can’t use the word ‘solitude’ anymore, because they worry that people will think it’s a reference to Gabo. And soon, we may not be able to use the phrase ‘100 years’ either.” No writer in the world has had a comparable impact in the last half-century. No writer since Charles Dickens was so widely read, and so deeply loved, as Gabriel García Márquez.

“One Hundred Years of Solitude, was translated into 35 languages and sold more than 30 million copies. The Nobel committee rewarded him for books “in which the fantastic and the realistic are combined in a richly composed world of imagination, reflecting a continent's life and conflicts.”

In his Nobel speech, he said it was the “outsized reality” of brutal dictatorships and civil wars in Latin America, "and not just its literary expression," that got the attention of the Swedish Academy of Letters.

That has been the focus of commentary. Here are excerpts from Gabriel Garcia Marquez on journalism, the other craft he excelled in:

Some (70) years ago, there were no schools of journalism. One learned the trade in the newsroom, in the Friday-night hangouts. The newspaper was a factory where journalists were made... We were so passionate about our work that...left little room for a personal life.

The newspaper was then divided into departments: news, features and editorial. The most prestigious was the editorial department. A reporter was somewhere between an intern and a gopher.  Time and the profession proved it functions the other way around.

At the age of 19, I began a career as an editorial writer and slowly climbed the career ladder through hard work to the top position of cub reporter...

Then came schools of journalism and the new technology. Graduates arrived with little knowledge of grammar and syntax, difficulty in understanding concepts of any complexity and a dangerous misunderstanding of the profession. The importance of a “scoop” at any price overrode all ethical considerations.

The profession, did not evolve as quickly as its instruments of work.  Involved in furious competition for modernization, newspapers left behind the training of its foot soldiers, the reporters. They abandoned the mechanisms of participation that strengthened the professional spirit.

Newsrooms become septic laboratories for solitary travelers. There, it seems easier to communicate with extraterrestrial phenomena than with readers’ hearts. “The dehumanisation is galloping.”

Before the teletype and the telex (before Internet), a journalist with a vocation for martyrdom would monitor the radio, capturing what seemed little more than extraterrestrial whistles. He’d piece the fragments together, adding background as if reconstructing the skeleton of a dinosaur from a single vertebra.

Editorializing was forbidden, because that was the sacred right of the publisher. Everyone assumed, (they)   were written by him, even if they weren’t. And always, they were written in labyrinthine prose, which, so history relates, were then unraveled by the publisher’s personal typesetter often hired for that express purpose.

Today fact and opinion have become entangled: there is comment in news reports.  Never before has the profession been more dangerous. Unwitting or deliberate mistakes and, malign manipulations can turn a news item into a dangerous weapon.

Bad journalists cherish their source as their own life—especially if it is an official source—endow it with a mythical quality, ultimately develop a dangerous complicity with it that leads them to reject the need for a second source. Only three elements are essential in our work: the notebook, foolproof ethics and a pair of ears.

Ethical transgressions and other problems that degrade today’s journalism are not always the result of immorality. They also stem from the lack of professional skill. Perhaps the misfortune of schools of journalism is that while they do teach some useful tricks of the trade, they teach little about the profession itself.

Any training in schools of journalism must be based on fundamental principles: first and foremost, there must be aptitude and talent. “They must   return to basic training on the job and to restore journalism to its original public service function; to reinvent those passionate daily 5 pm informal coffee-break seminars of the old newspaper office.”