“Why don't you write about the good?” - one student asked me when I came with a lecture to the school of young journalists in Donetsk.

The round table brought together students and high school students, taking leave from couples and lessons for the sake of this morning meeting on Monday. On the wall hung a banner with the inscription “Union of Journalists of the DPR”.

“When you come to us, you only write about the bad,” the student added. - Why?

By that time, I actually wrote several posts from Donetsk on social networks, and one of them was devoted to problems with obtaining Russian passports.

- What, for example? - I specified. - What do you think is bad?

“For example, you write about ruined houses,” the student answered.

“Is that not true?” I asked. “Aren't they destroyed?”

- This is all true. But I would like to read about good.

“Advise me about what is good to write about, and I will certainly do it,” I said.

“I can't do that right away,” she answered after a moment of thought. - But still I want us to have good.

I was going to answer that in Donetsk there is a lot of good, for example, traveling by tram costs three rubles. In Gorlovka - two. True, from February 1, 2020, the price of a tram ride in the DPR will rise to five rubles, and this has already caused a flurry of indignation in the Ukrainian media, but still the cost of a tram ride will still be about two times cheaper than in Ukraine. The good thing is that these trams ran, at least within the center, even during the war. The streets are clean. In the center on Lenin Square there is a beautiful Christmas tree, and I like it. The Christmas tree is good. People have returned to Donetsk over the past couple of years, and now it’s even crowded in the center. But still there are situations that need to be corrected. And the duty of a journalist is not to be silent about them, but to designate them. Once in the information space, the problem is more likely to be fixed. But I didn’t have time to say all this because another student raised her hand and, with her question, put all the dots on the “i”.

- I have a question. Suppose I want to write about the good. I choose the topic of the good, but when I start to study it, it turns out that there is bad. How not to slide into bad? After all, I want to write about the good.

For about five minutes I said that such a choice - to write about the good or the bad - does not work in journalism. Each topic is a territory of the unknown. You proceed to it, not knowing in advance what you will find in it, and you can find both good and bad. But if you know in advance what lies in this topic, then you are deprived of one of the main qualities of a journalist - curiosity. And your viewer or reader, of course, will see that you yourself were not interested in studying the issue.

I talked about the fact that writing about the bad is much easier: there is conflict in the bad, there is drama. But in the bad you can find the good

For example, we talk about the Donetsk hospice living on the front line. It would seem, well, what’s good: in the hospice there are not only people who can no longer be cured, but also shells fly into it? But now you start to interview the hospice director and find out that he comes to work every day, overcoming the shelling, and once he went overcrossing the crossfire with a gas canister so that the inhabitants of the hospice had electricity. Isn't this human feat good? And is it not good that there are such people who are ready to sacrifice themselves for the sake of others? In general, the installations “I will tell you about the good” or “I will tell about the bad” do not work in journalism. What you find, about that and tell. And we must not forget that in the wrong side of the bad, there can be good, and in the wrong side of the good, bad, because this is the structure of the world in which everything is mixed. Bad and good can be found in the same person.

I noticed that future DNR journalists are especially interested in listening to my stories from peaceful life: about a man from the village of Lokot who saved eagles, about a small beauty contest in the Ural town of Verkhoturye. And I realized that, speaking of the good, they mean such stories - where there is no war, there are no shelling, there are no dead, there are no destroyed houses, there are no pensioners living below the poverty line. Yes, the story of a man with eagles can hardly be called good - a criminal case was brought against him for keeping the Red Book birds, and he was facing a very real prison term. But there is still no hopelessness in it. This is a story of one person’s misfortune, but he lives in a world in which there is no war and which will develop according to certain laws. And how will the world of the Donetsk people's republic develop, not a single resident can say now. And it deprives you of strength, knocks the soil out from under your feet, and makes it difficult to plan and dream. Therefore, people do not want to be reminded of their uncertainty. They do not want lecturers to come to them and speak with patriotic slogans. They want simple human stories that give students the belief that someday they will write about the peaceful, ordinary, ordinary, about the victory of ordinary people - not over the enemy, but over themselves. And they also give them confidence that the war will end and everything will be fine.

The author’s point of view may not coincide with the position of the publisher.