We go blank

I’ll be honest: I don’t know what to write about. As a journalist, this seems as such a paradox – there’s so much to write about. I recall one of my lecturers in uni telling us that as a journalist you should be able to turn ANYTHING into a story.

And here comes the crunch, I think. Maybe I just have too many stories in my head, and writing a snapshot of my own in this column is the hard part.

Perhaps this is because it’s difficult to write about all the matters that fall in the ‘grey’ areas, where opinion leads the way and facts prevent you from looking on the bright side.

Perhaps I was put off by a recent encounter with a friend, who pinpointed her disbelief in the ‘system’ which diffuses that information (mass media outlets), how short-sighted it is and how it doesn’t look ahead.

And she has a point. It may be hard or perhaps impossible to envision the future factually, yet it may not be as difficult to project an outcome. Should we take the more than 800 migrants that died in the recent capsizing of a boat off the coast of Libya?

I haven’t come across any article that tackles the need of the survivors, for example – the logistics.
Where are they living? How much money do they need to restart their life? Which countries would be willing to take them in? What would it take to have them return home? What is the plan for them? Or rather, what plan could ‘we’ come up with for them? The news is over…

This may be a somewhat idealistic approach to the problem and, of course, some of these questions are not that easy to answer, but my point is that there’s a side to reporting which isn’t touched upon that often.

There’s a power there that we’re (including me) perhaps not using as much as we could.
This may be due to the tempo we’re working under… and then, all of a sudden, we go blank.
We have nothing to say because we hear too much, chew too much and don’t say enough.