So, introductions.
You may be wondering about the name. It’s an obscure pun which amuses me, but which is probably too obscure to amuse anyone else.
‘Gacetillero’ is Spanish for a tabloid hack. ‘Lazarillo’ means ‘guide for the blind’, as in ‘perro lazarillo‘, Spanish for a guide dog. It comes from the first picaresque novel in Spanish, Lazarillo de Tormes, which tells the tale of a young urchin working his way up the food chain on the streets of medieval Spain. It’s quite an amusing book, in its way, for its satirical take on the mores of the day - though it had a much greater impact when it was published, coming as a reaction to the tales of chivalric knights which dominated medieval Spanish literature.
Anyway, the ‘guide for the blind’ reference comes from his first adventures in the novel: he is apprenticed to a blind beggar. There’s little love lost between the two: the blind man whacks him into a statue when he first meets him; Lazarillo responds by stealing his food and wine, which results in the blind man knocking little Lázaro’s front teeth out with a bottle. Their relationship ends with Lazarillo’s final revenge: he tricks the blind beggar into jumping headfirst into a stone pillar, believing that he is crossing a stream. Lázaro leaves him unconscious on the street and takes off down the road.
Why, then, this went into the language as slang for a guide dog is hard to fathom - but that’s precisely why the name amuses me.
There’s a slightly more serious point to it as well. I’m a journalist by trade: I wrote about the Middle East for a while - business, mainly - and now write about energy.
Journalism is a difficult thing to get a hold of. At its best, journalism can be an incredibly powerful thing. Some call it the first draft of history. There’s no doubting that well-researched, well-analysed journalism can have a massive influence on people’s perception of the world, and thus shape the course of subsequent events.
But the majority of journalism falls far short of that standard. Tight budgets and tighter deadlines mean that most journalism these days is cobbled together from press releases with a bit of superficial background to give the piece a little context. Proper, painstaking research is something you only have the latitude to do at the peak of your career - it’s not the norm.
Most of the problems with journalism today stem from the distance between those two poles. People often treat journalism with credulous awe, not recognising that in between the facts and the words is a journalist - frequently flawed, often stressed, always limited in knowledge and understanding. A human being, in other words.
Of course, that’s not to say that there aren’t a few good publications out there; nor that there are no good journalists. I’ve had the great pleasure of working with some particularly talented, if largely unrecognised, writers. But it’s important to be realistic about the flaws of the medium. We journalists frequently dress ourselves up with fancy words and ideals, extolling our social function and claiming to serve the cause of truth. But we’re as fallible as everyone else - there’s no getting away from it. We have, however, a vested interest in not admitting our fallibility: and so, as a rule, we don’t.
That’s why Lazarillo de Tormes was such an important book when it was published. Lázaro was one of the first unreliable narrators. Granted, he was fairly frank with the reader, disarmingly naive compared with the unreliable narrators of modern literature. But that frankness is why Lazarillo is ultimately a sympathetic character: he is the epitome of the lovable rogue. You forgive him his flaws because he does not try to hide them behind high ideals and hifalutin rhetoric: he is simply what he is, and he makes no bones about it.
Like everyone else in my profession, I have high ideals. I hope that my writing and my photography can somehow add to the sum of human understanding. I believe that good journalism can help bridge rifts of misunderstanding, facilitate communication between different cultures, and bring people closer together. I hope one day to produce something truly transcendent, something that exposes, however briefly, one sparkling facet of human nature.
But, at the end of the day, I’m just another hack pushing his wares. Don’t take what I do too seriously.