Creative delirium: thoughts on journalism, technologies and narrative
When I began my professional life, all I wanted was to write, but I didn’t know how to achieve it. That’s how I ended up, somewhat indecisively, at one of the then four main newspapers in Saltillo. Journalism quickly became something I couldn’t part with until today. At first, it was an idealized love, then a toxic relationship, and later a hope against the world’s entropy. Today, I can’t understand myself without journalism, and consequently, I can’t understand the world without this prism.
Fifteen years later (ten of them working in the same place), I believe that discipline is one of the fundamental things to achieve it. Not talent, not coincidences, not luck. I know it’s not a wondrous finding in the most common sense of the phrase, but it’s enlightening in a more intimate way.
Now, I’m not as disciplined as I would like to be, certainly talent doesn’t reside in me, I don’t believe in coincidences, and luck is a god I no longer pray to. But here I am, after many twists and turns, seeking a form of journalism that seems congruent with the world and with myself. Of course, I’m trying to build it somehow; sometimes, it feels like placing one stone and then another and another until the tower collapses, and you have to start again.
But I don’t want to turn this into a long and solemn discourse that leads nowhere. The decisions I’ve made have put me in a beautiful yet uncertain place.
I’m leading the editorial innovation department of a media outlet whose main source of income is still the print format. Therefore, we pursue the same holy grail as the rest of the newspapers in our situation: making digital income sustainable, increasing it, and improving the industry’s structural issues.
In my case, I have to do this by designing strategies, seeking creative alternatives to content and processes, creating special editorial products that don’t belong to our daily operation, or intervening in the dynamics of work teams. Sometimes, I’m asked to do things I don’t know how to do, like inspiring people or making decisions that influence the course of things. In other situations, I have to think more about the business side and safeguard the interests of capital. And, of course, those overwhelming administrative tasks that no job is exempt from.
To be honest, there are times when I feel suffocated by the sensation that I’m doing anything but journalism, but taking a pause and realizing that, at least in my case, the decision to change that perspective lies more with me than with the rest of the world, helps me regain the mainstream functionality that society demands and, at the same time, injects hopeful, ridiculous, romantic, and peculiar ideas about the future of journalism.
It’s those latter ideas that keep me on this path and make me certain that the effort and defeats are always worth it to build a journalism that doesn’t exist today.
It seems I always become cheesy and melodramatic. Perhaps I do. But this article is not about that either.
I decided to start this blog because 2023 has been a crucial year in my life. I won’t talk about the personal aspects here, but regarding work, it brought me a stability I didn’t know I needed and, furthermore, it allowed me to explore something that had only sparked fleeting interest in me for years: artificial intelligence.
Whether it’s due to the flirtation I’ve had with technology since my childhood, when I used to ask for household appliances to open them up and see how they worked, or because companies today demand rapid implementation of emerging digital developments, the fact is that this year, I’ve been able to explore a wide variety of software focused on natural language, generative images, and automation with greater pleasure and freedom.
That’s what I’ll be talking about in this space. How journalism and artificial intelligence coexist within me, blending, fighting, falling in love, dying, reviving, conquering me, making me sick, and who knows what else.
I don’t believe in right answers, so I come here with more questions, doubts, anger, and hopes than dazzling answers or discoveries.
This blog is a rather selfish dialectical exercise where I’ll declare my editorial loves and hates. Because, in the end, beyond technology, metrics, and algorithms, I still hold on to the same idea as before: I just want to make a living from writing. While I achieve that, I’ll enjoy this journey.
This blog is a rather selfish dialectical exercise where I’ll declare my editorial loves and hates. For example, my fascination with stories and narrative journalism, my enchantment with illustrations and infographics, my stubborn and unreasonable pursuit of filling newspaper front pages with fiction and poetry, my disappointment with the lack of essays and chronicles in the media, my enmity with SEO, how much I despise hard news even though they are somehow necessary, how dull I find the news, not just because they’ve already happened, but because they lack conflicted characters, and probably references to poetry and pop culture throughout all of this.
Well… in the end, beyond technology, metrics, and algorithms, I still hold on to the same idea as before: I just want to make a living from writing. And I care more about good ideas, even if poorly executed, than technological perfection in the structure of news websites.
That’s the path I hope to tread here.
