“The journalist is people who tell people what happens to people”

The author of the most exact and most threatening definition of journalism, Eugenio Scalfari, died this Thursday in Rome at the age of 98, after a career that amazed by the rigor of the journalistic companies he embarked on, including the newspaper. The Republic of Rome, and for the enormous effectiveness of his articles, his titles and his doctrine on a profession that, in 2009, when I interviewed him in the small studio of the former director and president of the newspaper he founded, he said that his print version was in imminent danger of death.

I heard that phrase about the substance of journalism in the early 1980s, at the inauguration of the School of Journalism in Village. Of patrician demeanor, still young, with a beard that made him look like an old Marcello Mastrioani, he explained to the aspiring journalists and to us that we were there that “The journalist is people who tell people what happens to people”.

His newspaper told people what was happening to people, of course, but it also told him what Scalfari thought of the events that were happening in Italy and in the world, since his personal editorials, almost always published on the front page, had a great impact in Italy.

Twenty years after that appearance in front of the students of the trade, Scalfari held another lecture at the University of Turin, of which I read the review just as I was about to interview him in that cubicle where he felt happy, ready to talk about journalism and whatever else. it took.

On that occasion, forced by current events, already managed with the wires of the primitive networks, he said in his speech in Turin that “journalism is a cruel profession“. And this is what I was about to ask the professor when the following news from Germany jumped from the network to my mobile phone: “The German professors announce that paper journalism will cease to exist in 2018”, so I told Scalfari the prediction.

Sitting in the chair from which he kept giving his opinion and taking an interest in the informational nutrients he was using to calibrate what was happening, he pointed to his watch and asked me:

─Does that news say exactly what time that event will happen?

He died of old age, four years after, according to all the evidence, the prediction of German scholars about the end of the era of paper newspapers had failed.

His continues to exist, and there are shelves all over the world that still retain the written expression of what is not only digital, but the consequence of what thousands of followers of Scalfari’s craft write for the newspaper to keep the news at beyond the emergency networks. He was proud of the newspaper website he created, but the story didn’t make him a fan of what seemed like the only future.

He was a much loved writer in Italy. As a reporter he was feared because of his influence on him, but even then he did not believe his most famous phrase, because the reporter now, he said, “is not only the one who writes about people, but in the profession also manifests cruelty“.

It was also journalism, “a cruel job”. According to him, it was no longer necessary to just tell what the characters were like, but also to undress them, “and that’s cruel because people don’t like being undressed”. In fact, it was once said that it is a novelty that man bites a dog, and not the other way around, because now “men do not like to see themselves described while biting a dog; this is cruelty ”.

The private life of the characters was sacred to him, and he believed that sacrilege was now the order of the day. As for the question that worried fortune-tellers at the time more than Scalfari himself, the survival of journalism (especially paper), he told me a sentence from José Zorrilla (“The dead you kill are in good health …“).

I asked him if the newspapers whose end had been announced were still in good health. And he replied, rubbing his abundant hair with steady hands, with careful fingers:

─I would say I’m not in good health, but I’m still a great reference point. It is necessary to give them more credibility, to make the brand attract the public to new technologies. Nothing else can be done and, of course, this will lead to a major reorganization of companies.

At the end of our meeting he wanted to accompany me to the exit. To get ahead he said to those who went or went, so as not to stumble: I do away (I go ahead), which perhaps can be interpreted as what he really was in the trade, one who paved the way for a trade where he was a ram and, what’s more, a very good auctioneer.