50 years of stubbornness

Forgive me for talking to you about me today;

It is, for once, a topic I know about.

Today I celebrate half a century as a journalist.

Or, to put it in a less bombastic way: 50 years ago I wrote my first article in a newspaper.

Perhaps my most interesting learning from these decades is precisely that: the difference between two phrases that seem to say the same thing.

But, also, there is a story.

That February 16 was summer in Buenos Aires and it was Saturday and it was incredibly hot.

I worked as a cadet or intern – “chepibe”, they called it there, because of that “che pibe, bring me this or that” – in a newspaper that had just started.

It was called

Noticias

and the Peronist left paid for it.

I didn't want to be an editor but a photographer but, above all, I wanted to work: I was 16 years old and I was waiting for my opportunity serving coffee, handing out papers, buying cigarettes to order.

But that Saturday the opportunity was changed: full vacation, the newsroom almost empty and a journalist desperate to fill his pages asked me if he could write a news story from an agency cable.

I had my pretensions as a teenage reader and almost a poet: I said yes, I did it, it was printed.

Martín Caparrós, photographed at his home in Madrid.Claudio Álvarez

The news – like so many, perfectly unnecessary – was titled

A frozen foot 12 years ago

, and began by saying that “Twelve years the foot of a mountaineer that the Austrian expedition found, a few days ago, almost at the top of Aconcagua, was frozen. ”.

The note offered more useless details, such as that “the leg, wearing a mountain boot, that the members of the Vienna Alpine club found last Monday the 11th, when they were descending from the summit, belongs to the Mexican climber Óscar Arizpe Manrique, who died in February 1962, failing, by a few meters, in his attempt to reach the roof of America.”

It was published on Sunday the 17th. On Monday the world continued to be almost the same, but that journalist told me that he had not done it wrong, that he wanted to continue doing it, and I told him that of course he did.

News

did not last: the Peronist Government closed it in August of that year.

But in those months I began to believe I was a journalist – guided by my boss, Rodolfo Walsh – and I felt like the luckiest person on the planet and I began to imagine that this was what I wanted to do with my life.

A year and a half later the military got worse and I had to leave Argentina;

In France I returned to the profession in a protesting wall newspaper,

Le cri des murs

, and then something in Spain – some notes in this same newspaper – and then I returned to Buenos Aires and never left it.

And now I am very impressed that 50 years have passed.

In this time the profession has changed so much.

Checking that February 16 was really a Saturday, for example, took me about fifteen seconds on the network;

In those days getting a perpetual calendar and completing the entire operation could have been a matter of hours.

It is the norm: accessing information is so much easier that it seems to justify, with some frequency, that we do not look for it;

that we are content with what they give us, that we buy mailboxes and mouthpieces with a click.

We hide behind the other basic difference: speed.

Now each media outlet aspires to tell what perhaps happened seven minutes before the competition.

Because, to begin with, information is no longer delivered at a fixed time.

In those days the radios and TVs had their news at their own times and the newspapers came out in the morning or afternoon: if something happened at 2:00 p.m. you had time until 8:00 p.m. or 9:00 p.m. to find out better, think better, write better, be corrected. ;

sometimes it was noticeable.

Now, first of all, you would have to “put something on the web” at 2:08 p.m., otherwise you will arrive later than someone else.

And the saddest thing is that this doesn't matter to anyone who is not an editor: I have never seen a reader of EL PAÍS say ah, no,

El Mundo

published it five minutes before, I'll change.

What also doesn't change are those things that tell us that they have changed so much.

That the press is guided by interests, for example.

It always did: newspapers – and then radio and then television – were always created by some political or economic sector to spread and sustain their idea of ​​the world, but now it seems that this was new.

It can be harmful, but no more than then.

Or that the press gives false news, which it always did: the only difference is that now this news spreads faster on the networks, but the denials also arrive sooner.

Or that the press goes out of its way to offer its public torrents of blood.

It was always like this, except that before they seemed less because there were not, in every corner of the planet, before every accident or incident, a number of people recording it on their cell phones - and now, when every media includes amateur images of the horrors that happened in Malaysia, Honduras, Belgium and Japan, the world seems like a continuous catastrophe.

What did change with the technique is this desperation to be consumed.

It always existed but, until recently, no editor knew if yesterday's edition had sold more because of the political cover or that sporting triumph or the singer's death;

Now they know instantly how many read what, and they despair.

The logic of the rating is that a grade matters less for what you see than for how many watch it.

Many media submit to this dictatorship, where those who define what is worth publishing are the thousands or millions who click or not on a more or less misleading title and a –hopefully– careless text: the curious idea of ​​degrading our work to be able to continue doing it.

If so many years ago I was told that doing journalism was telling what someone doesn't want to be known, now I suspect that doing so is telling what many don't want to know.

Not to write for numerical demand but for an audience that does not always exist, a utopian public understood as a legion of demanding, mobilized intelligences;

writing for a group that may be smaller but that can only grow if we work for it: that audience in which my teachers believed.

And I miss the newsrooms: they have dissolved into light and silence.

They were dark oases, full of the noise of typewriters and shouts to make themselves heard over those noises and the tobacco smoke and the smells and the bad mood that was convenient to show even if you didn't have it and that schoolyard spirit, kids doing mess.

But, in addition, they served: there they cooked for us.

In Argentina in 1974 there were no journalism schools or faculties: they were not necessary.

The journalist's training was done on the job, like medieval apprentices: the old ones, the good ones, taught you how to do it by making you do it.

That I, in my first draft, could ask or copy or suffer the wrath of Walsh or Juan Gelman or Paco Urondo was a privilege, but not so rare.

On the other hand, now the best old people no longer work in the newsrooms, they have no contact with the new ones, they cannot teach them – and there is something that is lost all the time.

Although the biggest change in the media – Argentine, at least – is that, in the third drawer of the desk, where everyone had the bottle of gin, there is now yerba mate: they are different lives.

Journalists no longer think of themselves as those “bohemians” who stayed drinking for hours and hours, who waited for the newspaper edition until dawn in some bar, who believed they were different and went to bed hating the sun that insisted on making their lives bitter.

Now, for better or worse, journalism is a profession like many, with similar schedules and models, with many complaints about benefits and stability – but, still, with this strange ambition to portray the world.

And that's what saves him.

I detest the superficiality of journalism, its idiotic smugness, its insistent nonsense;

I detest the emptiness, the vanity, the vagueness of journalism.

And yet I am passionate about it and most of my friends are journalists and my wife is a journalist and I consume it with fervor and I have practiced it for 50 years and I don't even want to think how much less I would like my life if I had done something else: if that day , in that editorial, the foot of the Mexican mountaineer would have found someone who knew how to tell it.

Last March this newspaper gave me, a year in advance, a reward for my persistence.

When I received it I said, among other things, that it is a

“Strange work, the one we do:

They pay us little, they treat us

like cheap rats

or the most stupid of the stupid.

And yet we know

and we are not afraid to say

what if I had to choose

very few of us

They would choose any other:

That's how we want to live.

And by doing so it can be

Let us make enemies.

But right here I tell you

that everything cannot be:

Ours is not to please,

be scribes with pleasure

of what minds say

mediocre people who manage us.

We must, despite their complaints,

show what those people are.

And don't keep repeating

what his vicars point out:

words from your summary

that don't add up to a clue.

There is nothing worse for a journalist

than working as a notary.

It must be reality

the one who writes our diaries.

And not just talk about those

who tend to believe they are news;

don't stay in greed

of counting goals and kisses

and conspiracies and congresses

of those who have power.

We better hold

that ambition without barrier

to narrate the entire life,

the adventure of learning.”

I've been trying for 50 years.

I often don't get it, but I never thought that was a good reason to stop trying.

Old Beckett, always: “Try again, fail again, fail better.”

Not doing so would be a mistake.

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