Meet a Journalist

A journalist's profile, stories and career in the field of journalism. Know a journalist who should be profiled here? Send an e-mail to Janet E. Bardon

March 7, 2001
Stephen Strauss
Science Writer, The Globe and Mail
sstrauss@globeandmail.ca

I chose journalism because it didn't appear to me that I was going to be a success at what I really wanted to be which was a novelist. I didn't care about clothes and flowers, and that seemed to me to be a fatal literary flaw.

I took a degree in history from the University of Colorado, passed a semester in law school, did a bit more graduate work in political science and then said: Enough. I never went to journalism school, though I did work briefly for my university newspaper. I was a copy editor which, given my spelling skills, was not the right place to be.

I never had a mentor, but I always liked Karl Kraus' motto for what he did: Say what is. I think learning to type and taking French were the smartest things I ever did, career-wise, although I also thought a course in Hegel was instructive.

My most difficult assignment is coming in every morning these days without knowing what I am going to write on, but knowing it had better damn well sound authoritative at the end of the day. I quite liked spending a week looking at science in Hawaii and a couple of weeks going to the Nobel ceremony in Sweden and swanning about the country doing other things after that. I expect the year I am about to take off to write a book on food will be another high point.

My advice to young journalists would be to, as best you can, do what you like. Life's too short to lead it according to others' estimations.

The hardest thing facing journalists is that it is less and less clear what journalism is and how it is practiced. The Internet is pressing against all older kinds of media. What kind of deformation it will leave in its wake is still anybody's guess.