Malcolm Gladwell talks to the Independent about his early days as a journalist shaped his book writing skills.
Modesty may not be Gladwell’s natural mode, but nor is he arrogant in any unpleasant way. But, yes, sir, he did do the necessary apprenticeship to become excellent at what he does. “There is this moment of mastery that descends,” he offers. It happened for him as a reporter one afternoon in 1993 when a gunman had opened fire on a Long Island commuter train. Gladwell was the New York bureau chief for The Washington Post at the time. With the first deadline almost upon him, he made it out to the scene and dictated the entire front-page story over the phone without writing down a single word.
“In my first years I wouldn’t have conceived of doing it,” he says. “I just got on the phone and called it in and didn’t think twice about it.” He has since done a “back-of-the-envelope” calculation of the hours spent writing for the paper up until that day. Ten thousand hours, of course. “It’s a marvellous moment. There is a reason why cognitively complicated jobs require long apprenticeships.”
The demise of apprenticeships in journalism is a shame, gone are the days where every journalist was an apprentice.