Thoughts from a retreat
The newsroom is quite a hectic four-wall confinement. It is gruelling and daunting to perform the task of seeking the story of a man who bit the dog. Daunting because that involves dealing with sources that sometimes act funny when you are trying to get that extraordinary story. That pressure really gets to your head. You find whole hours going down the drain and the workload remains just as much as it was when you energetically first entered the room; blank pages—which are supposed to be filled with stories—are just gazing at your face. While you are figuring out who to call for this or that story, you are also wondering which is a good enough picture to go with the stories. Reading a story you just wrote moments before, makes you want to get some paracetamol to ease the headache. You realise that you wrote tenses that were not making sense, the syntax was not correct and that the subjects and verbs were not in concord while the spellings would upset the Queen. All the while, you are ...