Become a reporter! There are many candidates for journalism schools. When Candice Mazaud-Tomasic and Fanny Baye say around them that they are journalists, since as students they can claim to be as they are, and that it’s more a way of life than a job, the reactions around them are always the same. Faces close, bodies stiffen, and distrust immediately materializes: “I don’t want to talk to you, you will distort my words” for the most courteous formulas, because nervousness is never far away. “You are sold”.
Sold to whom? Candice and Fanny would like to know it, they who live in student precariousness and want to become a reporter precisely to bring to everyone’s attention the accuracy of the situations, the nuances and the complexities of the field. Fanny even says it: she doesn’t want to invent stories, or even embellish them and arrange them in her own way, otherwise she would be a fictional author, she wants to understand the postures and collect the testimonies that she will restore in its most accurate expression.
There is in Candice, Fanny and Pierre Bourgès, the desire of a generation to give each other another look at this profession. Pierre wants to bring even more transparency and pedagogy in the practice of his profession. Media education is also an important vector. Give the youngest the keys to understanding, how to prioritize information, what is an editorial conference and a space for debate. Transmit to the youngest the possibility of expressing themselves.
There is a desire among journalism students today to do this job, because as young people or simply as individuals, they did not feel represented in the media. No doubt also for this reason, this generation wants to bring the concerns of the climate emergency, but also those of gender, and these are just two examples. Also bring more diversity. Pierre didn’t want to become a journalist simply because he didn’t know what the way to become one was, and what to do. Since his Corrèze, he thought it was not for him.
In Brive, journalism schools are not in student lounges and guidance counselors are struggling to indicate the way forward. Pierre guided himself and no one helped him. It was by advancing in his condition as a student from rural areas that he found a path that led him to the IJBA (Institute of Journalism of Bordeaux Aquitaine). His vocation then took shape.
The notion of responsibility in informing motivates and frightens Candice. Motivates because the stakes are fundamental: fighting against general mistrust through a more open practice of the profession is a noble and strong intention, but frightened by the existence of parameters that are more difficult to control. How many times a listener/viewer thinks he hears/sees what he wants to hear and see. Not out of dishonesty, but out of misinterpretation.
It is also a teaching of the functioning between the transmitter channel and the receiver channel which requires more fluidity, more interactions, more understanding. A significant investment by both parties around the verification of information, decryption, the source. And resorb the lines of fracture.
While distrust sometimes manifests itself in physical and verbal violence towards journalists, students, journalists of tomorrow, very attached to meeting those who do not think like them, to give all the facets of a plural reality, intend to commit themselves to the service of reliable information. It’s not a promise. It’s even stronger, it’s a conviction.