"I'm an efficient, good, professional reporter. But I also write. And so what I try to do is write about places that I know that I care about intensely and write about them in a way that conveys the fact that I care"
About this Quote
Journalism likes to pretend it runs on neutrality, but Alma Guillermoprieto is naming the engine most reporters are trained to hide: attachment. She opens with the hard credentials - efficient, good, professional - the language of deadlines, accuracy, and newsroom merit badges. Then she pivots on a small, defiant word: "But". It signals that something essential gets left out when reporting is treated as a purely technical craft. "I also write" draws a boundary between filing information and making meaning. It is a claim for style, voice, and the moral charge of attention.
The repetition of "know" and "care" is doing quiet rhetorical work. Knowing a place implies fluency: history, texture, power relationships, the daily rhythms outsiders miss. Caring "intensely" risks the cardinal sin of the objective pose, yet she reframes it as a discipline rather than a bias. The subtext is that distance can be its own distortion; detachment often flatters institutions and edits out lived reality.
Context matters here: Guillermoprieto built her reputation reporting from Latin America, where foreign correspondence has long been shaped by parachute reporting, ideological stereotypes, and the market demand for simplified crises. Her intent is almost a manifesto against that flattening. She is not arguing for sentimentality; she is arguing for accuracy with a pulse. The final clause - "conveys the fact that I care" - is a bet that readers can feel when a writer has stakes, and that this feeling is not decoration. It is part of the truth.
The repetition of "know" and "care" is doing quiet rhetorical work. Knowing a place implies fluency: history, texture, power relationships, the daily rhythms outsiders miss. Caring "intensely" risks the cardinal sin of the objective pose, yet she reframes it as a discipline rather than a bias. The subtext is that distance can be its own distortion; detachment often flatters institutions and edits out lived reality.
Context matters here: Guillermoprieto built her reputation reporting from Latin America, where foreign correspondence has long been shaped by parachute reporting, ideological stereotypes, and the market demand for simplified crises. Her intent is almost a manifesto against that flattening. She is not arguing for sentimentality; she is arguing for accuracy with a pulse. The final clause - "conveys the fact that I care" - is a bet that readers can feel when a writer has stakes, and that this feeling is not decoration. It is part of the truth.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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