If you want to rub shoulders with the best–or at least best-known–people of your time, there can hardly be a better job than writing for a newspaper: fresh out of school, a young press person will often find him or herself in the same room as prime ministers, labour leaders, sports and entertainment stars, the most famous–and, indeed, infamous–personalities of the age.
It's a privilege few jobs confer. Big shot businessmen have to make hefty contributions to political parties to have dinner with their prime ministers at the most exclusive ball of the year–but the most junior of reporters might be assigned to cover the event, and have his dinner paid for, to boot!
The press also trumps radio and TV, when it comes to getting to know a public personality. I've done all three forms of interview and, though electronic interviews might reach their audience at once, their very nature makes it more about how everything looks or sounds than how deep it all goes (and some electronic media interviews can look and/or sound distressingly bad).
No, the written version is the cleanest and truest of them all, if only because, to write a half-decent piece about someone, you have to spend a lot more time with them than you do for a television or radio interview; even Steven Sackur could present a better picture of his BBC Hard Talk subjects if he had the time to see what makes them tick, rather than what makes them jump or squirm.
In my own time, I've interviewed the West Indies cricket captain (several of them, actually), the president of the Chamber of Commerce (at least a couple of those), leaders of the opposition aplenty, several leading sports figures, social figures including nuns, priests, imams & insurrectionists and every Caribbean musician I love (except Bob Marley and the Shadow). Nearly everyone I've ever wanted to meet in Trinidad, I've had the chance to, through these pages.
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