The best job in the world

(CNN Spanish) — Gabriel García Márquez described journalism as “the best job in the world.” “Journalism is the profession that most resembles boxing, with the advantage that the machine always wins and the disadvantage that it is not allowed to throw in the towel.” 40 years after the Swedish Academy awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature to Gabriel García Márquez, and noting that this fact radically changed the view of our continent, taking into account that his writing marks a before and after in the way of telling endemic, unique and delusional stories, becoming a showcase of our cultural tradition, today we will talk about the importance of their legacy for those who, daily, face that other narrative: the art of doing journalism in Latin America. How to separate the journalistic work from the literature that led him to win the Nobel? Literary formulas within journalism, stark stories found in his chronicles taken to literature make up the interior landscape that critics and academics continue to study and dismember in the infinite work of the author born on March 6, 1927 in Aracataca, Colombia. Jaime Abello Banfi, General Director of the Gabo Foundation, answers our questions in The Bold Question. 1- What is the Gabo Foundation? What were the reasons for its birth and to what extent was Gabo involved in that process? The Gabo Foundation is the living work of the winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize for Literature that is written day by day. The germ of it is in his project of a newspaper that was never born: The Other, a national newspaper for Colombia in which he was going to invest the money from that prize. In an interview in 1983, the same year I met him in Barranquilla, García Márquez dared to say: “I don’t want to be remembered for ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’, nor for the Nobel Prize, but for the newspaper. I was born a journalist and today I feel more like a reporter than ever. It’s in my blood, it pulls me. Also, I want us to make the best newspaper in Latin America, the best informed, the most truthful, the most accurate. May they never rectify us.” Ten years later, Gabo returned to the fray, when, on a December 1993 night in Barranquilla, he presented his idea to me: holding workshops with journalists, and he asked me to help him develop it. After six months of conscientious planning, we created the Foundation for a New Ibero-American Journalism in Cartagena in 1994. I accepted his invitation to assume the direction and I retired from the regional channel Telecaribe. For his part, he led the Foundation’s presidency until his death, guided our start, helped find teachers, allies and resources, financed part of the budget for the first years, but above all he devoted himself joyfully to experimenting his educational theories with some memorable workshops on reporting, chronicles and judicial journalism. He gave a detailed account of all this in the speech he gave in 1996 before the IAPA assembly in Los Angeles, California, entitled “The best job in the world.” It has been 27 years since we did the first workshop. Now we are called Fundación Gabo and we are a consolidated institution in which a permanent group of 30 collaborators works, with the guidance of an international board of directors that includes Rodrigo and Gonzalo García Barcha, Gabo’s sons. Our mission is to promote active and better-informed citizens, by training and encouraging journalists and promoting in different audiences the ethical, creative and dialoguing use of the power to investigate, tell and share stories, inspired by Gabo’s legacy and in his workshop method. We try to be faithful to García Márquez’s strategic vision, but updating it to the reality of changes in the communication ecosystem and society in general. We maintain an annual program of activities that has benefited and connected thousands of journalists from Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula through face-to-face and virtual workshops and seminars, awards, scholarships, publications, digital content and online services and our maximum event, the Gabo Festival. . Workshop for editors with Alex Grijelmo- Cartagena 1998- FNPI Archive Photo 2- What was your friendship with Gabo the writer? Which one with the journalist and what do you remember most about the human being? When I met Gabo when I was 25 years old, I was defiant and almost arrogant in my arguments towards him, but that attitude did not bother him, on the contrary, it served to trigger a friendship. When we started working, he integrated me into his intimate sphere with great affection, as did his wife Mercedes. Gabo was for me a model of a Caribbean gentleman of great dignity, values ​​and achievements. In his style, he combined cheveridad and rigor, that is, joy and cocksucker, but, above all, disciplined and results-oriented. He maintained a democratic attitude of bonhomie and egalitarianism in interpersonal relationships, but he was extremely jealous of his privacy, polite and careful in dealing with others. His pragmatism led him to repeat the common sense words of his mother Luisa: “The best is what happens”. One day he told me: “I authorize you to use my name before third parties for what you consider necessary and convenient for the Foundation, but on one condition… that you never make a mistake.” My effort has been to faithfully interpret the vision and values ​​of that great man, to live up to the responsibility that he conferred on me and to enjoy what we do every day with a young team, in interaction with some of the most interesting from Latin America, to train, inspire, connect and promote talent. With the participants of a workshop of the FNPI- Cartagena 1999- FNPI Archive Photo 3- In these 40 years of the Nobel Prize, what are the activities that the Festival will carry out and what awaits the Foundation in the coming years? We are going to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Nobel between October 21 and 23 in Bogotá, a city that was very important for the development of Gabriel García Márquez as a journalist. There he trained as a reporter and special correspondent at El Espectador and also promoted several of his journalistic initiatives such as the QAP newscast and the Cambio magazine. We bring to the capital of Colombia the 10th edition of the Gabo Festival, our great annual meeting of journalism, culture and citizenship of the Spanish and Portuguese speaking countries. On Friday the 21st, the exact day of the anniversary of the Nobel Prize announcement, we will award the Gabo Memorial Prize to chronicler Juan Villoro, for the excellence of his work and career, and to the authors of the best stories in Ibero-American journalism in five contest categories. With that, we kick off a three-day festival at the Bogotá Modern Gymnasium and the city’s network of libraries, with 125 events that include talks, workshops, concerts, and exhibitions. It is not a professional congress or an academic symposium, but rather a citizen’s party around the ideals of journalism and the practice of a journalism of the future that is already among us: free, independent, innovative, entrepreneurial, ethical, creative journalism, which he knows how to use technology, committed above all to his audiences and many times dedicated to causes of social, environmental or other change in his news agenda. Here the key is to distinguish oneself from proselytism and communicational activism, in the sense of recognizing that journalistic information must be assumed as a public good, as long as it is based on verified facts. The future of the foundation revolves around promoting this journalism, but also helping new generations better use the power of communicating stories, building and finding solutions to the pressing problems we face, instead of dividing or sowing hatred. Finally, it is up to us to deepen, study, disseminate and promote projects around collective appropriation and the use of the legacy and memory of the life and work of Gabriel García Márquez as an asset for social and cultural development, so that the world is better. ——- At the end of this interview with Jaime Abello, I wonder how the journalist Gabriel García Márquez did not contaminate his literary work with the heavy load of reality that came into his hands in the writing of a newspaper and how he achieved his great journalistic chronicles without sweetening the truth with too much poetry. To answer this question there is only one way out, to read the complete works of the 1982 Nobel Prize winner for literature.