Serge Schmemann
Serge Schmemann
Serge Schmemannis a writer and editorial page editor of the International Herald Tribune, the global edition of the New York Times. Earlier in his career, he worked for the Associated Press and was a bureau chief and editor for the New York Times...
ProfessionJournalist
Date of Birth12 April 1945
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There are many roads to journalism. My feeling is that your best bet in college is to study the subjects you will want to write about, whether politics, the environment or the law.
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I guess what I'm really saying is something obvious - that there's a unique pride in watching a home team from rival turf, especially when we're not supposed to be any good.
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Definitely read a quality daily paper regularly, and use the Internet to check out the press around the world as often as you can.
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Writing for adults and writing for young people is really not that different. As a reporter, I have always tried to write as clearly and simply as possible. I like clean, unadorned writing. So writing for a younger audience was largely an exercise in making my prose even more clear and direct, and in avoiding complicated digressions.
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Like many a Yank before me, I have tried to explain to European friends that Americans actually know soccer quite well, that many of us played it in school and college, but that, well, we just don't find it quite as exciting as, say, what we call football.
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We all know that much of what we hear in life is not really so. Canned laughter and 'sweetened' applause have been TV staples for decades, and all the slamming doors, breaking glass and squealing tires you hear in movies are sound effects.
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Bus routes reach the most obscure corners of Paris. There's also the Metro - and especially the great Line No. 1, which runs on tires under the Champs-Elysees and beyond.
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The fall of the Berlin Wall is very much a sequel, a continuation of the story about Eastern Europe emerging from war and Communism. The notion of presenting history as a story also appealed to me very much, since that is the way I look at the events I cover as a reporter.
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Parisians overwhelmingly buy small cars. And it's not because people are petite, but because fuel is drop-dead expensive. Gasoline costs more than twice as much in Paris as in New York.
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Buyers of powerful cars place a high premium on the exhaust note, and manufacturers spend a lot of money getting it right. At the same time, high-end cars are expected to filter out the sounds of the mundane world.
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Recorded engine sounds, however, are a deliberate deception. They're like going to a concert and listening to a recording. On the other hand, I wouldn't mind buying a BMW recording and installing it in my '96 Jeep Cherokee.
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My own kids were with me in Berlin when Germany was reunited, and they were with me in Moscow when the Soviet Union collapsed. We talked about these things at the dinner table, at their schools, with their friends.
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Our daily life is filled with electronic pianos, ring tones, the disembodied voice giving you your bank balance over the telephone. Even silence can be electronic, courtesy of sound-canceling headphones.
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A history of perceived humiliation, after all, lurks behind many acts of terror. And competing narratives of victimhood and insults sustain conflicts in the Balkans, the Caucasus, the Middle East and many other regions.