Beijing, Monday.
A recurring question from your listeners is what life as a correspondent really is like?
What does everyday life look like?
I have thought about it sometimes and the other day, when I was preparing for all potential Nobel Prize winners, it struck me that life as a coward is to be crammed with information.
A kind of daily sausage stuffing there The brain is fed with large quantities of news, analyzes, interviews, impressions.
What then comes out at the other end is concentrated, compressed and hopefully resembles some type of relevant knowledge.
That is the dilemma of the grain.
Which part of the 40 minutes with the extremely knowledgeable expert on invasive insects should I choose? There is only room for 2 minutes because in the same report there are other interviewees, produced facts and environmental descriptions that compete for space.
In addition, the whole thing should translated which steals even more precious time.
I really want the listeners to hear everything, everything that I hear and see and experience.
Of course, this is not something only correspondents struggle with, all journalists have to work with the so-called “top of the iceberg” problem.
But, icebergs come in different sizes and my iceberg, East Asia, includes close to 2 billion people.
Here are the world’s second and third largest economies, China and Japan, and the Korean Peninsula, where the world’s most guarded border intersects between South and North Korea, two countries that are formally still at war.
Usually my curiosity wins, learning more, finding out more, is a strong driving force.
But it is human to despair from time to time, and then I usually think that at least I do not live in Bangkok, like my colleague Peder Gustafsson, Swedish Radio’s Asia correspondent, who has to cover about 40 countries, including India.
Not to mention SR’s Africa correspondent, Richard Myrenberg. Hans iceberg: 49 countries.
So, in that perspective, life as a whore is often a huge hoard of information.
Some of it is broadcast in radio, but most of it is stored in our interior.
A lot in the brain, a lot in the heart.
And when the opportunity arises, we try our best to share what we have gathered.
Maybe it leads, I think, to a curiosity among you listeners to take the next step yourself, to find out more about that thing you heard a few minutes on the radio.
Source: ICELAND NEWS