Jesús Mota, former director of 'Cinco Días' and editorial writer for 'El País'.
As much as things change, and they are changing a lot, when it comes to journalism there are a few demands that will always remain there. Stubborn and obstinate, they indicate that it is useless to be in this if you are not curious about the world and interested in the fate of its people, an eagerness to ask to understand what is happening and the ability to place each specific event in its context and establish relationships and derivatives that allow reconstructing its nooks and crannies. In times that extol heroism, they like to use the image of the tiny one that knocks down the monstrous creature that represents power with a stone. But the truth, which is after all what those who embark on the task of reporting pursue, is full of edges, so humility never hurts: you do what you can.
The new technologies, which are so helpful today, have the danger of transmitting a false sense of dominance. With so many resources at hand, it is possible to end up believing that things can be done apart from others, and thus forget that this trade has a lot of craftsmanship and that, like that of potters, there is no choice but to put the hands in the mud. A year ago Jesús Mota died. He had long been responsible for preparing the editorial drafts of Economía in this section. It was something withering, and it left - like others before him - a huge hole. That is why the reference to crafts: writing a newspaper is like a workshop where you learn the trade.
Mota was a huge guy in every way, sullen and sullen, with an enviable sense of humor: quick, witty, precise. The task of drafting forces the journalist to exercise a kind of second reading about the things that happen. It is necessary to go to the news, but also to the interpretations and the noise they produce, and to find the position, the look, the arguments that have to be cooked so that the management accepts each draft as good. Put your hands in the mud, put the piece together. Mota was a compulsive reader, filled notebooks and notebooks, picked up the phone as many times as necessary to grease ideas, contrast information, refine. And he was a master when it came to writing.
"The main cause of office overcrowding must be attributed to what we could call
the Swing Strategy," he
wrote in an
accent.
on these pages.
“Not long ago, some ten years ago, the bank exhibited an euphoric desire to bring the business closer to the client, to consider him as one of the family through the infallible (thus sold) technique of
personal treatment.
The small merchant, the retired person, the depositor (albeit a modest one) was going to find in
his
bank an admirer, a friend, a slave, a servant — the immortal declaration of José Luis López Vázquez to Katia Loritz in
Robbery at three o'clock.
But today the banking perspective has changed ”.
And so he continued to end by pointing out that customers had ultimately been left without that "personal treatment" so praised before.
There may be domestic calamities that you can live with.
But there are others that are intolerable.
The loss of Jesús Mota has been one of them.
The other could be that a craft of artisans such as journalism loses the complicities that a Newsroom generates.