Why Does A Journalist Need To Be Curious?

You will not survive as a journalist unless you are curious. Your stories will be boring, uneventful, and uninspired. Your readers will view your articles as stories they can skip over on their way to the sports page. If you're a sports writer, readers will view your articles as stories they can skip over on their way to the comics. If you work in television or radio, your viewers/listeners will flip to a station with reporters who care. Your stories will be black and white while the world is ever graying. You will soon be reading the classifieds section of the newspaper you once worked for. A journalist obviously needs to be curious for the sake of his or her job, but they also owe it to the readers and the stories they are covering.

I don't want to read a simple article or watch a simple voice over where I just get the who, what, where, and when. I want the why and the how. Everyone wants the why and the how. How unlikely was The Great Red Sox Collapse of 2011? Why did Terry Francona get fired? How did Gadaffi die? How did Arab Spring begin? Why did that crazy exotic animal owner in Ohio kill himself.? Why is it going to snow before Halloween? What good is knowing the facts without knowing how they got to be facts?

If journalists weren't curious, there would have been no Watergate. The course of American Politics and possibly the Cold War would have been forever altered. If journalists weren't curious, Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens would be baseball's biggest heroes instead of the sport's most hated men. There are countless stories out there, tremendously important stories, that would have went undiscovered without the presence of a journalist seeking more. The readers/viewers eat up those stories. The newspaper or televisions station will see a huge boom in ratings and readers. The journalist gets his or her 15 minutes of fame. The subject of the story gets their/its name out there, in a good way or bad. The positives are numerous, while the negatives of a curious journalist do not exist. Quite simply, to exist in this business, you must be curious