In the upcoming March / April issue of InPublishing magazine (not on the mailing list? Register here), we have interviews with two of the most notable journalists of this generation: Christina Lamb, chief foreign correspondent of The Sunday Times and investigative journalist Carole Cadwalladr, until recently freelancing with The Observer.
What makes them so good at what they do?
In our January / February issue, Peter Sands asked twenty editors what attributes and skills they looked for when hiring journalists. They answered, in order: 1. Attitude; 2. News sense / news obsessed; 3. People skills / interviewing; 4. Cross platform knowledge; 5. Writing skills; 6. Shorthand.
Sands recounts how one editor told him that being a good journalist was 80% attitude, 20% skill.
Our interviews with Lamb and Cadwalladr bear this out. In their cases, ‘attitude’ showed itself in a number of ways:
- Courage: reporting from war zones, where bullets are flying and tensions are running high, takes guts, as does uncovering things that powerful forces would prefer you didn’t.
- Tenacity: Lamb had to show determination to get editors to take notice of sexual violence in conflict zones when many editors’ initial reactions was, “Nobody wants to know about this,” as did Cadwalladr when researching and reporting on the threats technology can pose to our institutions, especially in the aftermath of the Brexit vote, when the prevailing mood was “enough already”.
- Idealism: wanting their journalism to make a difference, in Lamb’s case, to reduce the incidence of violence against women and girls in war zones and in Cadwalladr’s, to wake us up to the information war being waged against us, right under our noses, by the Russians.
Throw in a good dose of ‘empathy’ and ‘curiosity’ and you’ve got the makings of a great journalist.
If you have the chance to hire someone like that, then snap them up immediately, before someone else does.
You can catch James Evelegh’s regular column in the InPubWeekly newsletter, which you can register to receive here.
