1 jan

One year ago I quit my job at the FD. Recently I spoke with an old colleague of mine. He warned me not to be too cynical about current day journalism.
And he is right.
One of the problems I struggled with in the last year (or two, or three) was the idea that a background article could be the main article of a newspaper. Not the news itself, but the reflection of the news was going to be most memorable for your ‘readers’.
I dislike the idea. A newspaper like the FD should always be able to find an angle to the news that is original enough to be exciting for early morning readers. And then, who is in the mood to read background articles in the morning.
But this is no criticism. Today was the first time I read a newspaper where I understood that the newspaper is the new magazine. The dutch newspaper NRC had a main article about Arthur Snowden, the guy who released all the information about privacy issues in the past year.
Most of this information I already read somewhere else. But I thought it was a powerful statement of the NRC to focus on this guy at the end of the year. Also because this newspaper had been collaborating with the people Snowden trusted for the past months.
News; background; commentary – and never these categories of delivering information shall be confused. I made my mistakes by mixing them up, but I remember the conversations with superior journalists at these times as feeling like I was on the road to the ultimate insight in our profession.
I still find background, and commentary, something for the end of the day, or the weekend. I am simply not interested in the opinion of journalist A or journalist B when I am reading my breakfast. Let them focus on facts, and let them explain to me why they have put these specific facts in this specific order. After my evening meal I will have a look at opinions. This has the added benefit that so many people by that time have added their opinion that it is much easier to come to an own insightful judgment. This process can also easily wait to the weekend. How many stupid, uninformed judgments will have flown by then?
But this is not what I wanted to say. Time was wrong, of course, with naming the pope as man of the year. Edward Snowden was, who came second in the Time poll, to give them some credit. The NRC understood this, and made me appreciate the past year in a new light.
What a wonderful thing, the newspaper.