When someone asks me what it means to be a reporter, Lodovico Poletto comes to mind who, at a quarter to one on the night between 30 and 31 August this year, yells at me on the phone that a train has just arrived in Brandizzo. killed five workers on the roadbed: «I’m getting there, I’m in the car with a friend. I can write 50 lines on the fly, I’ll send them to you on WhattsApp. Can we reopen the newspaper? ».
Or I think of Flavio Corazza, former deputy editor of this newspaper, who at 8 in the morning on Sunday 4 November 2018 threw me out of bed in the hotel where I was on holiday, in Palermo: «During the night there was a flood with nine deaths in Casteldaccia. You’re already in those parts, do you want to go there yourself?”. Upon closer inspection, the evening before my wife and I had planned to spend the last of the three days in Palermo in Mondello. But I don’t tell Corazza: «I’ll get organized and go. I’ll send you 90 lines in the late afternoon, before taking the plane.” And I get going.
It is difficult to explain to those who do not do this profession the passion for news, and in particular for crime news. «Black is speed, nerve and patience», Giampiero Paviolo once wrote. You are dealing with people’s suffering, with their fatigue, with their more than legitimate desire to be left in peace.
You have to chase people who have no desire to talk to you, bombard the prosecutor on duty with phone calls, stand for hours in front of a police station, get kicked out of a hospital where you have no right to enter. As if that wasn’t enough, you have to watch your back from competing newspapers: a better journalist, or simply luckier, could have news that you missed. And the next day there are pains.
When I was in news, I saw Meo Ponte every single day Republic, someone who has a flair for news like few others. Adversaries on the field even if friends off it, we spent the days trying to outsmart each other.
He himself gave me the greatest sorrow. Both sent to Santa Margherita Ligure for the liberation of little Patrizia Tacchella, the following day the news came out that the gang of kidnappers was suspected of having kidnapped three other children in Turin many years earlier. I still wonder today how he knew this. On the other hand, I remember as if it were yesterday the day in which I published on the front page the arrest of Stefano Iegani, a banker from the then CRT responsible for a film-worthy theft in the branch where he worked, in Cascine Vica. Meo didn’t have a line. He called me very early the next morning: “It’s going to be a bad day…”.
The truth is that reporting is hard work, and only those who have done it can know it. Ask Irene Famà, news reporter from Turin, and Monica Serra, news reporter from Milan, two of the best black writers around in Italy today for confirmation. Yet, every time it is a different emotion. In his The ProvincialGiorgio Bocca recognizes this at a certain point: «I have no nostalgia for the political or economic journalism of those years, it was worse than now, but for the news yes, for that profession between the reporter and the policeman that telecommunications killed or lazy.”
Being in the news is not like being in the editorial office: «Great events – wrote Giorgio Calcagno in his The story hour by hour – they arrived with short communiqués, flashes of five-six words destined to become an avalanche in a few minutes.” Today, major events enter the editorial office through news channels or newspaper websites, but little changes: they land on the editor’s desk, however filtered by the fellow reporter who, on the spot, dictated those flashes or, as happens today, sent a short article for the web. For those who work in the editorial office, they are news muffled by distance, odorless despite their terrible burden of pain and anguish.
Whoever is a reporter has a physical, almost carnal relationship with the news. A fact occurs, and must be reconstructed in all its aspects, without judging or justifying. In one of his Maigret, Georges Simenon writes: «Facts are facts, and no reasoning can ever refute them». Every time the reporter smells something that even vaguely resembles a story, he feels something click inside him. It could be a phone call from a lawyer friend: «If you come to Court, this morning I’ll dismantle the statements of that witness who ruined my client: I bet the judge will have him arrested! ». The cue from an informer: “I have a bomb report in my hands…”. The banal report from a neighbor: «On Youtube I came across a video shot at a party in the hills: you should see it. And you should hear how they talk…”.
Every now and then I hear people say: it’s just news or, worse, gossip. The usual crushed dogs as they say in France, the usual crushed dogs. I say that news is life. And with that poor life there are those who have been able to create literature. Don’t you believe it? Go and reread what he wrote on the Courier Dino Buzzati regarding the Albenga tragedy. Then we’ll talk about it again