journalist

Then someone cried out, __uicide bomber!_ The crowd panicked. In the ensuing stampede, terrified pilgrims ran in both directions, many colliding in the middle of the bridge. A side railing collapsed under their weight, and scores leaped into the water whether they could swim or not. Hundreds were trampled to death. More than a thousand died. Hundreds of pairs of sandals were scattered around the bridge, left behind when pilgrims made their desperate dives into the river. I was given all of seventy-five seconds to tell the story on the Nightly News.

All the best! You are a local legend in a Brisbane and Australia...you probably don't realise just how much...you will get released from that hell hole...you will come home...and discover your 'celebrity status'...which you will probably find nearly as hard to cope with...a different version of hell...anonymity to global fame...what a remarkable journey your life is. Keep safe...head down...this will pass.

She still loved the profession and enjoyed the lives and piece to cameras, but she knew it was all a tad too farcical at times. There were far too many stories they reported and forgot. Far too many conflicts that were once headlines and had captured the imaginations of many now awaited resolution, stale and unwanted as yesterday__ tea. It was hard to keep up your spirit when you started realizing it was just a job after all and that a headline did not change someone__ destiny. Except maybe the reporter__ if she or he was picked up by a rival channel for better pay. So getting into the profession wanting to make a difference and working for the greater good as the journalists of yore had done was certainly not an option anymore.

They were going to the house of a man who was shot dead. What was with all the exuberance? But maybe that was the only way you could move forward after mindlessly recording stories of brutality and violence for days on end? Maybe detachment was the only way. But if you could not be passionate about your job, what was the point in doing it?

The death of a billionaire is worth more to the media than the lives of a billion poor people.

Yet I am incapable of writing the only kind of novel which interests me: a book powered with an intellectual or moral passion strong enough to create order, to create a new way of looking at life. It is because I am too diffused. I have decided never to write another novel. I have fifty 'subjects' I could write about; and they would be competent enough. If there is one thing we can be sure of, it is that competent and informative novels will continue to pour from the publishing houses. I have only one, and the least important, of the qualities necessary to write at all, and that is curiosity. It is the curiosity of the journalist.

I had an interview once with some German journalist__ome horrible, ugly woman. It was in the early days after the communists__aybe a week after__nd she wore a yellow sweater that was kind of see-through. She had huge tits and a huge black bra, and she said to me, __t__ impolite; remove your glasses._ I said, __o I ask you to remove your bra?

When a state is afraid of the journalists, it means that that state is definitely doing some secret devilish things!

The reason why she had chosen journalism was because of those who had done so before her. Stalwart women and men who reported stories in the days before the Internet. Before it was fashionable to learn Mass Communication. A long time before being a TV reporter and calling up your family to see your face beamed to their homes was an in thing. They were those who had left their families behind as they pursued the truth, opting to go to jail when the government hounded them to reveal their sources. Men and women that would rather quit than write editorials the management wanted them to write. Journalists who never wrote a word they would have to disown. Journalists who took their last breath as they wrote an article was true to what they believed in. They would never sit down and take stock of the stories they had covered and written saying, __o what if twenty of these are non-stories, I at least had five I believed in.

I imagined it was far better to be optimistic, to proceed assuming wherever you could that you had cared enough, that you'd made a difference, that you would again. Dwelling on the worst was no way to live.

VW used to mean FAHRVERGNUGEN and now it's FARFROMUNION!Birgit Von Schondorf

I'm Freelance Journalist that covers political stories from around the world. I've been featured in CTV News and BBC.