butterfly
Roger Cohen
Roger Cohen is the international writer-at-large for The New York Times and a columnist for the International Herald Tribune. He was foreign editor of The New York Times throughout the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. While holding this position, the paper won a Pulitzer Prize for international reporting and two Polk awards. Cohen has also worked as a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Reuters News Agency.
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In fact journalism in many ways is the antithesis of the Here Comes Everybody — Clay Shirky’s good phrase — deluge of raw material that new social media deliver. For journalism is distillation. It is a choice of material, whether in words or image, made in pursuit of presenting the truest and fairest, most vivid and complete representation of a situation. It comes into being only through an organising intelligence, an organising sensibility. It depends on form, an unfashionable little word, without which significance is lost to chaos. As Aristotle suggested more than two millennia ago, form requires a beginning and middle and end. It demands unity of theme. Journalism cuts through the atwitter state to thematic coherence.
In the making of the choices I have described, presence is required. Because part of the choice lies in something ineffable — the air you breathe, the sounds you hear, the shadow light as a bird’s wing that falls across fearful eyes — something that cannot be seized or rendered at a distance.
Technology has enriched journalism by expanding the means to deliver it and the raw material on which it is based. But technology has also diminished the incentive — and the revenue — to get out of the office. Understanding without the trained “view from the ground” (Martha Gellhorn) remains impossible. Nature abhors a vacuum, journalism even more so, and so it fills absence with windiness.
SOURCE: nytimes
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