Fears, anxieties, and horrors are not only personal and collective, but also highly professional.

The horrors accompanying the work of journalists that we’ve identified here, of course, don’t convey the full picture, since journalists are afraid of specific things. Even the most brave.
 

1. The camera or audio recorder’s battery dies during an interview. You know you won’t have an audio or video recording… you wake up in a cold sweat.

 

2. The computer crashes (there’s a power outage in the building, city, country), and you didn’t manage to save your story. Your work is lost.

 

3. The chief calls and asks… it doesn’t matter what he asks; what’s important is he’s asking something of you. You immediately begin to worry.

 

4. You have information but no source to confirm the information. You’re forced to keep it to yourself. The constant dilemma of to write or not to write gnaws at your soul.

 

5.When you are asked to to write an “exclusive” news story. Forced, you add this word to the story.
 

 

 

6. When you are told, “Send your questions in writing.” You want to take a large and heavy stone and… send a response in cuneiform.

7. Your source promises to call back in five minutes and confirm the information. You wait. No call. The news gets old, then decays. You stop considering yourself a full person.

8. You have to write four pieces, but you’ve begun only one. Tomorrow you have to write five pieces, but you’ve begun only one.

9. During the press conference, everyone (except you) asks stupid and lengthy questions. You fear you are the only cleverest person in the room.

10. There’s nothing to write. A constant and most horrifying terror without which a journalist is not a journalist.

 

 

Nune Hakhverdyan