"Reporting — one of history’s oldest professions, even as it has gone under different names — will survive and prosper, while 'journalism' as a respected discipline threatens to dissolve into another branch of the entertainment industry. How will good reporting survive? Individual men and women will slip away from the crowd — away from the panels and seminars, the courses and conferences, away from the writers’ hangouts and e-mail networks — to cultivate loneliness. They will demand of themselves not to write a word about a place or a subject until they know it firsthand. And they will do this out of curiosity — for as the illusion of knowledge grows daily, the reality of places themselves becomes more of a mystery."
The quote above is from an essay by Robert D. Kaplan published last year in Columbia Journalism Review (entitled "Cultivating Loneliness") in which he laments the lack of geographical context in contemporary journalism, yearning instead for a "return to terrain, to the kind of firsthand, solitary discovery of local knowledge best associated with old-fashioned travel writing." Having just finished reading Alain de Botton's The Art of Travel, which is more philosophical than journalistic, I can identify with the idea that witnessing the discovery of the personal within the general is a beautiful thing in a piece of writing, and I'm sure journalism could benefit from the type of commitment that Kaplan is advocating.
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