Photo: Vít Pohanka, Radio Prague International
Martin Řezníček is one of the anchors of the Czech Public Television flagship news program Události. He recently moderated a key debate in the Czech presidential election campaign. His firm and flawless performance angered one of the candidates: Andrej Babiš the opposition leader who ultimately lost the election to Petr Pavel.
Martin has had a very rich journalistic career working for the Czech Section of the BBC World Service in Prague and London and spending some 5 years in the United States as a correspondent. I went to see him in his office on Kavčí hory, or Jackdaw Mountains, where the Czech Public Television has its headquarters. Even though he studied television journalism at the Faculty of Social Sciences of Charles University in Prague, he says young people who want to be journalists should try to get a different background:
“When I get to meet students and they ask me, ‘I want to be a journalist, should I study journalism?’, I tell them ‘Don’t study journalism, study something particular, something that will give you expertise. Study economy, sociology, political science, or anything basically, that will give you background and knowledge in a particular field. And you can learn practical journalism later. Yes, of course, it takes some time. But vice versa, you will never be able to catch up with the expertise. So do something and then come back, we’ll teach you journalism, quite easily. I studied journalism myself and I would have preferred if I studied more, maybe, international relations that I did as well, or any other field because it does pay off very well.”
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Authors: Vít Pohanka, Martin Řezníček