Affectivity: the differentiator of the 2030s reporter

Back in the 2010s, Paranaguá-born journalist Luiz Geraldo Mazza commented on a radio station in Curitiba: “there is little information, we need more.” Smart and cool, he has been making news since the 1950s — and stands tall like an araucaria. On that occasion, he was referring to a type of reporting that was replaceable. That is, how could a reporter’s description be better than a live video broadcast?

The stones of the Passeio Público know that surveillance cameras and the ones attached to cellphones changed the way we consume news, because the videos from those cameras recurrently illustrate websites’ front pages and prime-time television.

Integration has to do with interpersonal relationships and a sense of inner supply sufficient to cross delicate moments.

But not so fast. It is not the end of the activity as happened with parking-ticket collection. The reporter of this decade is even more necessary than in the last, since Mazza’s dreams came true. One of the most prominent challenges is staying relevant to oneself, to the purposes that led one to tick on the entrance exam form: “Journalism.”

A multimedia reporter is not necessarily an integrated reporter. A multimedia newsroom is not an absolute synonym for an integrated newsroom. Multimedia is recording for video, writing for the blog, photographing with some quality. Integration has to do with interpersonal relationships and a sense of inner supply sufficient to cross delicate moments.

The three ego states

In the first pages of the book “What Do You Say After You Say Hello?”, psychiatrist Eric Berne presents three types of what he called “ego states.” We tend to recall analogous theories, looking for parallels. On the other hand, I invite you, reader, to stay in the “here and now,” as a way of putting into practice what transactional analysis (the name of Berne’s main theory) proposes. When we communicate from the “Adult ego state,” we analyze the environment objectively (while in the “Parent” and “Child” states the head is in past references).

Far from needing ten pages of introduction, twenty more on methodology and thirty that nobody wants to read anymore, transactional analysis offers an approach to apply immediately. It is a sophisticated simplicity that serves as a parameter for every sentence a reporter pronounces. It is when one can put in the mirror the old practice of “separating the wheat from the chaff, and publishing the chaff.” It serves the craft as a whole, as a philosophy of life recommended for journalists.

In the world of livestreams and competitive newsrooms, there is also the delicate issue of post-truth. I call it delicate because, in some way, the conception of this idea is embarrassing. It is as if the renowned “bourgeois journalism,” as the Frankfurt School called it, lost its footing before “network” communication, instead of “beam.” And such a network, like many of us who interact with no need for a matrix stimulus, such as a headline, is more focused on how it feels about what it consumes than on the degree of accuracy of the reporting.

Where the reporter stands

The communication academy has looked at the question of affectivity and calls the relationship between advisors and researchers a “double exchange.” But those are words from articles, rather like bandanas on the invisible man. A powerful and creative tradition of succession has always existed in learning relationships — in a more or less useful way. It is said that in the past, the intern who had just arrived at the TV station was asked to go to the competing station and borrow a “colorbar ruler.” I have never seen that really happen, but it is a type of humiliation that, even imagined, is part of corporate folklore.

When one leaves the newsroom with a fixed idea of the story, there is no relationship with the source. There is the risk of fiction, superficiality and, why not, bad character.

With the profession of journalist slung over the shoulder, the individual reporter has their own transactions amplified. The relationship with the sponsored-content client, with the editor with whom they will argue what is or is not news, with the interviewee, is theirs. At this point, reader, the reporter’s intellectual and emotional health has to do with those folks of the network in the paragraph above who want to feel things and not collect them.

When one leaves the newsroom with a fixed idea of the story, there is no relationship with the source. There is the risk of fiction, superficiality and, why not, bad character. A reporter prepared for emerging technologies is, first, aware of themself and of the vocation they have. Then they can fiddle with Instagram — and show the difference a professional journalist makes.

Originally published in Orbis Media Review.