الريبورتاج والموضوعات الانسانية .. كتاب معلم الصحافة والإنشاء

Reportage and humanitarian topics

There is a close relationship between reportage and humanitarian topics, as they both deal with people and events that occurred in a specific time and place. The only difference between them is that reports may appear in seasons or periods of history, such as an article about the opinion of Sheikh Muammar on modern education systems, for example, or they may be new information that deals with people, things, or events that have a specific meaning. Its purpose is to convey information to the reader, while humanitarian topics aim to entertain the reader by presenting him with a written narration, whose actors are real, whose situations are real, and whose sole goal is to arouse his feelings.

Their boundaries may not differ much, as you will find that reportage contains strong elements of humanitarian topics. Which made many editors see that humanitarian topics are nothing but an extension of reportage. Therefore, it should not lose the element of novelty, and should derive its strength and importance from the elements of reportage. Every human being is affected by laughter, anger, pride, compassion, hatred, and kindness, whether in direct experience, or in imagination in which he shares the response of others, and these emotions are not limited to a subject. The standard that a journalist follows is to judge by his emotions the ones that make readers laugh and amaze them. The successful journalist is the one who unconsciously follows the rules of psychology in these topics. Every day, he delves into human behavior in relation to certain circumstances, and then chooses for his readers situations and incidents that arouse their feelings, men and women everywhere. In this regard, the American writer Arthur Breeze Payne, one of the leading humanitarian columnists, was a journalist who asked him: How do you always write a column? I spend my day observing people and their conditions, and reading the best writings. When the meaning that I chose as a topic for the column became fermented in my mind, I came to this room and wrote my topic on the typewriter with my own hand.

There is a big difference between these two pieces of journalism, and between the articles that appear in weekend newspapers, additional supplements, short stories, entertainment columns, women’s pages, cartoons, and many other materials that do not carry the meaning of news. Reports and humanitarian topics can be included under the category of news, because they contain the element of temporality that characterizes news. In relation to the other contents of the newspaper, it is strange and funny, because it goes far beyond the conventional rules upon which the news is based. Its subject is funny and the way it is written is different. It is like an appetizer in the list of daily news, because it leads the reader to unknown horizons. The writer of humanitarian topics must be a writer who has practiced collecting news, so that he can produce from it a complete story supported by facts, names, sayings, and correct information, in a simple, smooth style, far from redundancy, exaggerations of imagination, and empty words.