A week ago I have landed at the DF, This immense giant that from the plane seemed an endless cement plantation from which houses sprouted as far as the view reached. Then, Already on land, We discover a city full of life that smells like the pollen of cars and the flowers that occupy everything while a distant song that is heard in an ever open bar reminds you that in this earth everything except the easy sadness is allowed. When he cries, seems, There must be a reason. But all of that are sensations, impulses, looks as interested as lost. Soon, It is soon to draw any conclusion.
The DF will be my house presumably for at least the next four years. I will work, At first, Again for the newspaper El Mundo and I will continue to tell stories that pass before my eyes in this project that now turns five years and that we erroneously continue to call (I never participated in anything that seemed more present than this website but nostalgia prevents us from altering our "failures").
Nostalgia prevents us from altering our failures
What has changed that other type that five years ago went to South Africa of correspondent? What has changed in the storyteller? I guess the answer has to do with calm. Something that the years bring, Or experience or understand that coffee after trying it in a thousand ways you like short and with a sugar envelope. Go ahead that this text is a kind of contract with myself and that by doing so public elevates Fedatario to the reader. Go ahead that I lack so much talent and to fulfill it scrupulously, So they are benevolent when they stumble upon a hurry and egos for these and other pages.
In Africa, that I lived it five years between South Africa and Mozambique, And I traveled it repeatedly from north to south, I learned that this job of telling stories is particularly complicated in the immense unknown loneliness of the outside world. You are alone, In your environment, In this universe called the Internet where tags divide everything and where the has the rush of now do not allow you to think and evaluate the risks of your words. You are a complete writing that one day writes of politics, Another culture and another of sports. Imagine that the person in charge of writing economics in any national newspaper had to write the day after the protection of wild fauna and the next to make a complete report with sources of drug sale in the night bars of your city. Difficult, ¿no? Difficult to do well, say.
You are alone, In your environment, In this universe called the Internet
My first vertigo as a correspondent, I have understood that today, It was therefore writing almost blindly (So I wasn't so aware of the abyss I threw me). There is no time, There is a closure. The news has a now. You, Also responsible for the error chain, They consume them like this, immediately. The first to write (I) and the first to read (you). That is the success of the two parts always full of honorable exceptions.
Would anyone want to read now a calm and full of data and sources article about the death of Mandela? Do you really? Mandela has already died and without a great exclusive that the reader believes that it modifies something of what has already told is an already consumed informative product that does not need to read again. It doesn't matter if the new text orders everything, If you deepen a little more, If you clarify any little mistake, It is already passed unless the consumer understands that beyond the new depth there is something that gives news to everything. Something that can be presumed on social networks or in coffee.
And there is a responsibility that you understand many times with blows. And then you get the stereotypes of the first times, Based on your preconceived ideas before reaching your new home. You apply an unconscious logic about what readers expect to also identify in your texts their uses and customs about a place of which, like you, They know almost nothing. In South Africa that logic talked about violence, racism and poverty. In Mexico? Judge yourself.
The media are not so eviled to invent a reality
That does not mean that this is not real, that these three factors were not present in South African life as of course violence or corruption are in Mexican (The media are not so eviled to invent a reality); It means that now the frame is, The causes, The Bosura and the Focus. That is the trade and that I suppose it is our responsibility with the reader. No hurry, Understanding, explain… Difficult. Thus said seems a simple equation, But among all we have become complicated is the objective of narrating things.
The newspaper will ask me for a production, understandable, no objection. People apply to the media a curious non -business logic that makes them NGO or public services. Do not fool themselves, They are not. The media, Like restaurants, Stores and architects, exist to earn money like any company. Another thing is that the media have a greater power and their vices, which are many and especially unpleasant when mixing with manipulations and power, are more visible than those of a kitchen that uses leftovers to get benefits.
And then, Out of those real and majority media concepts, There is another world to talk about, other realities in which to look that are out of the country's stereotypes. I do not practice "goodism", I have not come to Mexico to forgive or wash their sins. I have come to tell stories, as I did in Africa, And I understand that the present commands and that if your corruption and violence is strong my duty is to tell it.
I do not practice "goodism" I have not come to Mexico to forgive or wash their sins
But my duty is also to count other realities, let that other normal life that Master Unamuno denominates intrahistory and that is always imposed on media reality at "flight ras". Because where we talk about unsustainable violence, in the distance, Like a whole, The overwhelming and normal life of a majority of people who perform a multitude of interesting back -back activities to the owner apocalyptic with a Passes routine is hidden. Life always wins, That has taught me to travel, And although that is not news must also be counted.
Go here for this measure contract, not to jump to conclusions, trying to count the important things first and the least important things too, after. Of not telling me and yes telling others. Go this desire as a whole to grab me when egos and doubts arrive, When the slapped sounds arrive that hurt the guy who reminds you of your news that he is not part of the Fast Press, that he knows reality better than you.
How much those first ostias hurt and what are necessary to put the feet on the ground. This is my contract with readers in this new section that starts today called "Correspondent in Mexico", Emphasizing my journalistic side about the traveler, mixing them on a chewboard called VAP. A way of not forgetting this responsibility. Pass, lean… and criticize when necessary but please with due composure that is due between gentlemen, Golfos and pens. They are at home.
