Cheer up! Hang in there! Hooray!
Emotionalizing is easier than deepening. This is because deepening requires background knowledge and time. Both are often lacking today. That is dangerous. By Karl Lüönd, freelance journalist and author.
There are a few basic sports, for example localizing, personalizing and emotionalizing. The latter is achieved by consistently reducing the distance between the reporter and the subject of the report. The closer you get to the affected, exclaiming, suffering person, the more difficult it becomes to maintain clarity. Hang in there, Lara Gut! Wonderful dancing, Sarah Meier! In the end, the reporter makes common cause with his counterpart or with an idea, a thesis, an initiative. In the exuberance of emotions, the reporter even becomes an actor. Then there are petitions against fighting dogs, and the newspaper offers rewards for the capture of a fugitive perpetrator.
Variety of presentation forms is important, so not every journalistic presentation can come across as a sober report. But apart from the fact that printed emotions will always come across as a bit papery: The newspaper as a cultural system was actually created in the wake of the Enlightenment. It was set up to explain things to people, not to applaud or lament. It is true that in the 19th and early 20th centuries, some newspapers - because many of them were party platforms at the time - were also used as agitation tools. But this function has long since disappeared. The fact that it is now supposed to return in the intensified competition for attention has to do with the fallacy that volume and effect run in parallel.
The alternative would be to delve deeper. But this requires knowledge of people, things, contexts and dossiers. This knowledge is no longer widespread among today's generation of journalists - and not because their colleagues are more stupid. They simply no longer have the tools and resources to be well versed in the important dossiers and thus become interlocutors and questioners who are taken seriously by the real experts on the subject in the boardrooms, in the authorities, etc.
The average Swiss domestic or business editor today works according to the Leonardo da Vinci principle: everyone is a universal genius. Military policy in the morning, university at lunchtime, health insurance in the evening. Today a local plant closure, tomorrow the WEF in Davos (from the ticker, of course, because the expenses for the trip there have long since been canceled). Colleagues hardly get a chance to update their knowledge and contacts. As formatting functionaries, they process the work of others on a piecework basis. Secondary sources are the rule. In-depth content is only feigned. In the food industry, we would have long since been talking about declaration fraud and counterfeiting.
I have just met a colleague who, in his prime, enchanted an entire city with sensitive, high-quality photo reportages on everyday topics and later enriched renowned magazines and the NZZ weekend supplement with extraordinary reportages. He no longer wants to have anything to do with newspapers, he now makes books and is available for demanding corporate publishing projects. "Gradually, they have not only reduced the fees, but also cut the expenses. Am I the publisher's sponsor?"
It's clear: I'll be fine without these wonderful reports. The memory fades, and I don't miss what I never got to know anyway. Instead, www.newsnetz.ch and www.20min.ch are full of these stupid live updates that reflect nothing other than the hectic helplessness of the authors.
How did we mock the "Blick" poster slogan back then? "Being there is good, getting out would be better...!"
