Thursday, September 25, 2008

What makes a new journo exceptional

The needle's got stuck on this, but then it's a new year; the next crop of talent is ready to take the challenge and the blog sphere is humming to this amongst academics and hirers.

Whilst the question draws some parody with jokes about light-bulb changing from lawyers to rugby players, everyone has an opinion; there's some common ground.

These are the best of times and the worst of times.

Basic principles, tick.

A penchant for the new and evolving culture, tick.

But for me the one things that stands out is that insatiable, big fat pressing
Because if you're nosey, don't take no for an answer, have an insatiable desire to understand what's going on, then a lot of those other things will fall in place when they cross your path or not.

Why is online different to print?
Why should I have to learn video if I'm a print journo?

Friends psychologists say we lose our propensity to question as we mature. Some outfits if you look at the US elections have completely lost it.

Margaret Thatcher, as Prime Minister was renowned for not entertaining questions from the public ( that famous incident).
.....

Why? Because at some time, that why drives you to discover, drill, mine, root out answers.

One of our students on her exit interview smiled, when she added:"best part of the course being up till 2,3 in the morning fixing our site".

You have to admire such focus and not be surprised when the why pays dividends.

And in case you're wondering, I don't advocate 2/3 morning work outs or as we used to call them at boarding school TDBs Till day Break, as a pre-requisite to fortitude.

But I guess if something's goto be done, it's goto be done, which reminds me of an item on Radio four when a US Law team had closed a deal on a Friday and needed to present on Monday morning, only to hear that their Brit partners quipped: "But it's Friday".

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