- Joan Didion in 1983’s Salvador, describing a sickened epiphany from her reporting trip during El Salvador’s civil war.
“Terror,” as she wrote earlier in the book, “is the given of the place.” She elaborated:
A mother and her two sons hacked to death in their beds by eight desconocidos, unknown men. The same morning’s paper: the unidentified body of a young man, strangled, found on the shoulder of a road. Same morning, different story: the unidentified bodies of three young men, found on another road, their faces partially destroyed by bayonets, one face carved to represent a cross.
That, then, is the context of her realization that shtick won’t do, that she needs to override the autopilot of her own trademark journalism, that there’s no value to the notes she’s just jotted juxtaposing the “guard who did the weapons check on everyone who entered the supermarket” and “the young matrons in tight Sergio Valente jeans, trailing maids and babies behind them and buying towels, big beach towels printed with maps of Manhattan that featured Bloomingdale’s.”
So here’s the seemingly insurmountable contradiction of being a reporter:
* Because deadlines loom, because readers don’t want the Sunday paper delivered on Tuesday, autopilot is crucial to journalism.
* The most potent, honest, revelatory journalism overrides autopilot. Even good autopilot. Even great autopilot. Even Didion-level autopilot.
Never be shy about throwing open the windows and waking the neighbors with your cheering when a reporter manages to be fast, accurate, deep, insightful, compelling, and nimbly adaptive. It’s a feat.
