2005-10-12

What I found out while away...

Insight #1: "The problem with the city of Sarajevo... well, it's a town!" (My friend K when asked about whether he enjoyed living there.)

Insight #2: Every journalist can be bought. EVERY SINGLE ONE. OK, maybe not old Commie-types who are genuinely uninterested in money (I know all two of them). But it was extremely dispiriting to see, close up, how easily you can buy some ad space (otherwise known as "reporting") in Dani, for example, or how people I used to respect would sell themselves for a few hundred bucks (which they ended up not getting, he he).

#1 plus #2: Not much reason for hope there.

9 comments:

Eric Gordy said...

Every kid wants to buy a journalist, but they don't realise that once you get it home it has to be fed.

Bora Zivkovic said...

But...journalists don't eat much,...or do they?

T K Vogel said...

No, but they still somehow manage to get fat.

Anonymous said...

OK OK Journalism is an indefensible eneterprise, comrades. Please urrender your web links to news immediately.

On a more serious note, nothing defined Sarajevo journalism better for me than during my fellowship there in 1999 and (a period of freelancing just after) during which journalists in the town A) accused me of trying to kill Oslobodjenje simply by reporting that USAID was not going to fund it any more and B) Accused me of being a spy.

Anonymous said...

Didn't mean to misspell and be anonymous above. Sorry Rich Byrne

Eric Gordy said...

Rich, we love your profession, which if memory serves me well was also Tintin's profession. As for Teekay, I've known him to dabble in a little journalism himself.

T K Vogel said...

Eric, you know my bank account details, right? I do prefer cash, though.

And I think the Serbian/Croat/Bosnian words for "spy" simply translates as "foreigner."

T K Vogel said...

Rich: misspelling *and* being anonymous -- you'll be barred from this site!

Katja R. said...

this reminds me of a funny experience I had! I was arrangeing my third trip over and my travel agent realized it was indeed my third trip, so she asked me, 'I want to ask you something and it's a little personal....you've gone to that country (BiH) THREE times now, are you a spy?' I sat there and laughed so hard that I began to cough. When I finally pulled myself together, I said 'No, I certainly don't run in such circles. And I'm much too flamboyant don't you think?'
I then had not the faintest claim to being a journalist. Now of course, I have a couple semesters in the now defunct school newspaper and my blog which sometimes has items definable as news, but that still doesn't make me a journalist.
Anyway it isn't what journalists eat, so much as what they drink and what they may smoke, and what may happen to any nice ladies in their near vicinity, unless of course the journalist is female. Then this might apply or it may be necessary to hide husbands, sons brothers uncles grandfathers...especially cute and intelligent husbands sons brothers uncles or grandfathers, since the female journalist isn't going to bother with stupid or ugly specimens.mwthq is todays really special untranslatable Klingon obscenity. I will not venture a translation, it's too rude