Learning to Be a Journalist in Middle Age: From the Courtroom to the Court of Public Opinion

By Matthew Parish, Editor-in-Chief

Lviv Herald

Sunday 8 November 2026

There is something faintly absurd about becoming a journalist in middle age, particularly after spending much of one's professional life as a lawyer. Lawyers and journalists have certain characteristics in common. They are professionally suspicious, they ask impertinent questions, they spend considerable amounts of time dealing with people who are being economical with the truth and they are widely disliked by those who have reason to fear what they might discover. Nevertheless the transition from one profession to the other has been considerably more unsettling than I anticipated. I thought that after several decades of dealing with difficult people, complicated disputes and the darker corners of human nature, very little would surprise me. I was wrong.

The first thing I discovered about journalism was the extraordinary freedom it affords. As a lawyer, almost everything you do is circumscribed by somebody else's interests. Your client determines the subject matter, your instructions define the limits of your activities and your professional obligations impose an elaborate framework of constraints upon what you may say or do. Even when you know perfectly well that your client is making a catastrophic mistake, there are limits to how frankly you may express yourself. You are paid to advance somebody else's interests, not to indulge your personal convictions about the nature of truth, justice or the human condition.

Journalism is quite different. Suddenly I found myself in a position in which I could write about virtually anything that interested me. I could investigate obscure political controversies, interview eccentric personalities, examine the conduct of public institutions, explore philosophical questions or describe the extraordinary experiences of people living through the war in Ukraine. I could decide that somebody was interesting and ask to interview them, without having to justify my curiosity to a client or explain how the exercise would contribute to a billable hour. I could write about the history of a railway station one day and the future of European security the next. The exhilarating discovery was that intellectual curiosity could become the organising principle of my professional life.

This freedom is intoxicating, but it also comes with a responsibility that is easy to underestimate. A lawyer has a client to protect and, in contentious matters, an opponent whose interests may be advanced by another lawyer. A journalist has a much more nebulous constituency: the public, the truth and those individuals whose lives may be affected by what he writes. There is no client to instruct you to stop asking questions, no court to rule upon the admissibility of your evidence before publication and no immediate institutional mechanism to restrain an error of judgement. The responsibility rests with you, and the consequences of getting things wrong can be substantial.

A lawyer who makes an unwise submission may lose an argument. A journalist who publishes an unjustified allegation may destroy somebody's reputation. Conversely, a journalist who declines to publish something important because he fears offending an influential person may contribute to the concealment of wrongdoing. The balance between these competing obligations is delicate, and I have discovered that it requires a kind of moral independence different from anything I encountered in legal practice.

I also discovered, rather unexpectedly, that telling people you are a journalist can transform an otherwise entirely agreeable conversation into something resembling an interrogation conducted by the secret police. A moment earlier you may have been discussing the weather, the price of coffee or the eccentricities of Ukrainian railway timetables. The moment the word journalist appears, facial expressions change. People become guarded. They begin to wonder whether their casual observations are going to appear in print, whether their friends will discover what they have said and whether the apparently harmless Englishman sitting opposite them is secretly assembling a devastating exposé of their personal lives.

In a country at war, this caution is understandable. Information can be dangerous, reputations can be fragile and the distinction between harmless curiosity and intelligence gathering is not always obvious to people who have lived for years under the shadow of Russian espionage and propaganda. Nevertheless, it is a curious experience to discover that a professional identity intended to facilitate communication can sometimes extinguish it altogether. One learns not to announce one's occupation unnecessarily, not because one wishes to conceal it but because ordinary human conversation is frequently more productive when people are not anxiously editing every sentence.

There is another, less attractive reaction to the discovery that you are a journalist. Some people become extraordinarily friendly.

At first I found this rather touching. People whom I had only just met would compliment my writing, praise the importance of independent journalism, assure me that my work was making a profound contribution to Ukrainian society and explain how delighted they were that somebody of my intellectual distinction had chosen to devote himself to reporting upon their country. Sometimes the flattery was so extravagant that I wondered whether they had mistaken me for somebody else. After years in the legal profession, where praise is generally rationed and often accompanied by an invoice, I was initially rather pleased by this unexpected outbreak of public admiration.

Then I began to notice a pattern. The compliments were frequently followed by a request. Would I write about their organisation? Would I interview their friend? Would I publicise their charitable fundraising campaign? Would I explain to the world why their particular quarrel with another member of the volunteer community demonstrated a profound moral failing on the other person's part? Would I publish their account of an obscure controversy, preferably without asking too many awkward questions of the individuals they disliked?

I began to realise that some people did not particularly admire my journalism. They admired the possibility that my journalism might be useful to them.

This is not necessarily an objectionable instinct. People who are doing valuable things frequently deserve publicity, and much of the purpose of local journalism is to give a voice to individuals and organisations whose work might otherwise remain unnoticed. Ukraine is full of extraordinary people conducting remarkable activities in circumstances of immense personal hardship. I have met volunteers, soldiers, academics, artists and charitable workers whose stories deserve to be told, and I consider it a privilege to be able to tell them. The difficulty arises when the person approaching you assumes that because their work is admirable, they are entitled to dictate the terms upon which it will be described.

A journalist is not a private public relations agency. This proposition seems self-evident to journalists, but it is apparently less obvious to some of the people who wish to make use of them.

I have encountered individuals who appear to imagine that arranging an interview constitutes a contract under which the journalist undertakes to publish a flattering account of everything they say. Others seem to believe that agreeing to listen to a complaint creates an obligation to adopt the complainant's interpretation of events. Some are astonished when you ask questions about finances, governance, competing accounts or the evidence supporting their accusations. They become irritated when you seek comment from somebody whom they regard as an enemy. They are positively scandalised when you explain that you may decide not to publish anything at all.

The most remarkable phenomenon is the speed with which sycophancy can turn into hostility.

Someone who has spent several days describing you as a brilliant writer and an indispensable supporter of Ukraine may abruptly decide that you are incompetent, corrupt, dishonest or morally deficient when you decline to publish precisely what they wanted. Your supposed intellectual virtues evaporate overnight. Your commitment to truth becomes evidence of bias. Your independence becomes arrogance. Your insistence upon hearing both sides of a dispute is interpreted as an act of personal betrayal. The transformation can be so sudden that it would be comical were it not sometimes accompanied by a distinctly unpleasant degree of aggression.

I have come to regard extravagant flattery as a warning sign. Genuine respect tends to be quiet, consistent and capable of surviving disagreement. Sycophancy is transactional. It is an advance payment on an obligation the journalist has never agreed to undertake, and the person dispensing it may become furious when the expected return fails to materialise.

The lawyer in me finds this especially interesting. In legal practice, the relationship between professional and client is defined by instructions, obligations and payment. Both parties understand, at least in principle, the nature of their association. In journalism, people sometimes attempt to create an entirely imaginary professional relationship in their own minds. They decide that you are working for them because you have listened sympathetically to their story, and then become indignant when you behave as though you are working for the newspaper instead.

There is also an extraordinary misunderstanding about the economics of journalistic attention. Certain people appear to assume that journalists are desperately short of material and will therefore be eternally grateful for any story that happens to wander in their direction. They behave as though offering to be interviewed is a tremendous personal favour, for which the journalist must demonstrate suitable gratitude and perhaps a degree of obedience. Occasionally they become downright rude, treating the journalist's time as worthless while insisting that their own is of immense importance.

In my experience, the opposite is true. I have more stories than I can possibly write, more people I would like to interview than I can reasonably accommodate and more subjects I wish to investigate than there are hours in the day. The problem is not finding material. It is choosing between competing subjects, establishing which are sufficiently important to merit attention and then conducting the necessary research with adequate care.

I might spend an afternoon talking to somebody whose account of humanitarian work is genuinely moving, only to discover that I have already committed myself to several other interviews, an essay about the future of the transatlantic alliance and an investigation into a controversy that may require days of document analysis. There is no shortage of things worth writing about in a country undergoing the greatest European war since 1945. If anything, the abundance of stories creates a moral difficulty of its own: every hour devoted to one subject is an hour unavailable to another, and some of the most important stories belong to people who lack the confidence or connections to approach a journalist in the first place.

This is why I have become increasingly resistant to people who attempt to monopolise my attention. Their cause may be worthy, but worthiness does not confer ownership over another person's time. A journalist must retain the freedom to determine what is newsworthy, what requires investigation and what simply does not deserve publication. That judgment will inevitably disappoint people, but disappointment is not evidence of professional misconduct.

One of the more depressing discoveries of my new profession has been the readiness with which some people resort to intimidation when persuasion fails.

I had become accustomed, as a lawyer, to receiving aggressive correspondence. Lawyers are trained to regard threats of litigation, accusations of bad faith and theatrical expressions of outrage as part of the ordinary furniture of professional life. Indeed, some lawyers seem incapable of writing a letter without suggesting that the recipient's conduct represents an unprecedented affront to the administration of justice. There is something reassuring about the ritualised nature of these exchanges. Everybody knows the rules, and even the most furious correspondence is generally written with one eye upon the possibility that a judge may eventually read it.

Journalistic hostility is rather less disciplined. People send insulting messages, make dark remarks about what might happen to you, suggest that you should be careful where you go or imply that unpleasant consequences may follow if you continue writing about matters they would prefer to remain undiscussed. Sometimes the threats are explicit. Sometimes they are wrapped in the language of friendly advice, as though the person issuing them is generously warning you about dangers over which they have no control. Occasionally the distinction between the two is deliberately blurred.

It is an unpleasant experience, even for somebody who has encountered his fair share of hostility in other professions. There is something peculiarly disconcerting about discovering that an article you wrote in the quiet of your room, perhaps with a cup of coffee beside the computer, has provoked an individual elsewhere into such fury that he considers intimidation an appropriate response.

Yet the temptation to overreact must be resisted. Not every angry message constitutes a credible threat, just as not every criticism is harassment. A journalist who chooses to publish controversial material must expect disagreement, sometimes expressed with considerable force. Public criticism is part of the profession, and journalists who demand the freedom to scrutinise others cannot reasonably insist upon immunity from scrutiny themselves. The distinction is between legitimate disagreement and attempts to frighten somebody into silence. The former is essential to public debate. The latter is its enemy.

Living and working in wartime Ukraine adds a further complication. People here are often exhausted, traumatised and living under levels of uncertainty that would be difficult for those in peaceful countries to imagine. Tempers can be short, suspicions acute and personal disagreements amplified by the extraordinary pressures of war. Some people have lost family members, homes, businesses or their sense of security. Others have devoted years of their lives to charitable work and feel acutely defensive when the integrity of their efforts is questioned.

These circumstances deserve empathy. They do not, however, justify threats, bullying or attempts to manipulate independent reporting. If anything, a society at war needs reliable journalism more urgently than one at peace, precisely because so much is at stake and so many opportunities exist for rumour, propaganda, exploitation and self-deception.

One also discovers that people have remarkably different conceptions of what journalism is for. Some regard it as an instrument of national morale, whose principal duty is to publish uplifting stories and avoid inconvenient questions. Others see it as a weapon with which to attack their personal adversaries. Some believe that the purpose of a newspaper is to validate the good intentions of its contributors, while others imagine that every journalist is merely waiting for an opportunity to manufacture a scandal.

My own conception is different. I believe journalism is fundamentally an exercise in disciplined curiosity, combined with a willingness to publish what one discovers even when the result is inconvenient. It requires the capacity to distinguish between what people believe about themselves and what the available evidence actually establishes. It requires sympathy without credulity, scepticism without cynicism and the ability to listen attentively to people whose opinions one may profoundly dislike.

These qualities are not entirely unfamiliar to a lawyer. In fact, I have discovered that my legal training has been unexpectedly useful. Lawyers learn to recognise the difference between an allegation and a fact, between inference and proof, between a witness's confidence and the reliability of his recollection. They learn that apparently compelling narratives may collapse under modest scrutiny and that the person who speaks most passionately is not necessarily the person who speaks most accurately.

The principal difference is that journalism does not normally provide the elaborate procedural protections of a courtroom. There is no compulsory discovery process by which reluctant individuals must surrender relevant documents, no power to require witnesses to attend interviews and no judge to resolve disputes over the admissibility of evidence. A journalist must work with what he can reasonably obtain, assess the reliability of competing accounts and decide whether the public interest justifies publication despite unavoidable uncertainty.

The discipline required is considerable. There is also the danger of becoming too pleased with one's own importance. Journalists can easily persuade themselves that they are heroic defenders of truth, courageously confronting the powerful on behalf of an oppressed public. Sometimes this description may be justified. More often, journalism consists of patient reading, mundane telephone calls, checking names and dates and making a series of small judgments about what can responsibly be said.

I have learned to distrust journalists who speak too grandly about their own courage, just as I learned to distrust lawyers who continually advertised their personal integrity. Both qualities are better demonstrated through conduct than announced in conversation. There is little heroism in publishing an article that annoys somebody, and the fact that somebody reacts badly does not establish that the article was either accurate or worthwhile. The journalist must be willing to consider the uncomfortable possibility that his critics may sometimes be right.

This has perhaps been the most important lesson of all. Independence does not mean obstinacy, and refusing to be manipulated does not mean refusing to listen. Sometimes people who approach a journalist with unreasonable expectations nevertheless have something valuable to say. Sometimes an angry complainant has discovered a genuine error. Sometimes a person who appears defensive is concealing not wrongdoing but embarrassment, fear or a perfectly understandable desire for privacy.

The task is to distinguish these possibilities without allowing one's judgement to be captured by either affection or resentment. It is particularly important not to allow unpleasant encounters to produce a generalised contempt for humanity. A journalist who becomes convinced that everybody is a liar, every charitable organisation is fraudulent and every expression of goodwill conceals an ulterior motive will soon become incapable of describing the world accurately. Cynicism may feel like sophistication, but it is often merely intellectual laziness dressed in a dark suit.

For every unpleasant individual I have encountered, I have met others whose generosity, courage and modesty have left me astonished. Some of the most remarkable people I have interviewed have been reluctant to speak about themselves at all. They do not send elaborate messages explaining their personal significance or demand glowing accounts of their achievements. They are too busy doing useful things to spend much time telling other people how useful they are.

In Ukraine, these individuals are everywhere. They work in hospitals, schools, universities, animal shelters, volunteer kitchens and military units. They transport supplies towards dangerous places, evacuate people from devastated towns and maintain fragments of ordinary civilisation under conditions in which ordinary civilisation might reasonably be expected to collapse. Their stories are not always dramatic in the conventional journalistic sense. Sometimes they consist simply of getting up every morning and continuing to do the right thing.

These are the people who remind me why I have chosen this peculiar second career.

I also find myself reflecting upon the difference between professional authority and personal freedom. For much of my life, I occupied positions in which authority was derived from institutions, qualifications, clients and professional titles. The law is hierarchical. It confers status through admission, seniority, specialisation and the recognition of one's peers. Journalism can be hierarchical too, of course, but the essential act of writing is wonderfully democratic. One sits before a blank page and attempts to explain something true. No professional qualification can guarantee that the result will be worth reading.

There is something liberating about discovering this in middle age. One has accumulated enough experience to recognise patterns of human behaviour, enough disappointments to be sceptical of easy explanations and perhaps enough independence to be less concerned about pleasing everybody. The young journalist may be anxious to establish a reputation, cultivate contacts and secure access to influential people. The middle-aged convert has already lived through a succession of professional environments and may be less impressed by the elaborate performances through which people attempt to establish their own importance.

There are disadvantages too. One does not possess the energy of a twenty-five-year-old reporter, and one may be slower to adapt to the bewildering rituals of modern digital journalism. The endless demands of social media, instant messaging and the expectation that every communication must receive an immediate reply can become exhausting. People sometimes appear to imagine that because they can reach you on WhatsApp at three o'clock in the morning, they are entitled to an immediate editorial conference. A lawyer can at least send a bill for an unreasonable demand upon his time. A journalist generally has to rely upon the less satisfying expedient of switching off his telephone.

I am gradually learning that the freedom to write about whatever I choose necessarily includes the freedom not to write about things I do not choose. This sounds obvious, but it has taken me some time to appreciate its importance. A profession that begins as an expression of intellectual independence can easily become another form of servitude if one allows every demanding acquaintance, ambitious publicist or aggrieved individual to dictate one's working day.

The challenge is to remain accessible without becoming available for exploitation, sympathetic without becoming an advocate and independent without becoming gratuitously offensive. I have not always succeeded. There have been occasions when I have been too trusting, others when I have been unnecessarily impatient and still others when I have allowed the bad manners of somebody else to occupy far more of my attention than they deserved. Middle age does not confer immunity from mistakes. It merely provides a longer catalogue of previous mistakes against which new ones can be compared.

I sometimes wonder whether the people who have insulted or threatened me because of something I have written appreciate how little they have achieved. Their anger may be intensely important to them, but for the journalist it is merely one more item in an already overcrowded professional landscape. An abusive message may be unpleasant to receive, yet it rarely alters the underlying facts. An attempt at intimidation may require appropriate precautions, but it does not make an inaccurate allegation true or a well-supported account false. The proper response is generally to preserve the evidence, assess any genuine risk and return to the work.

Perhaps this is the ultimate distinction between journalism and public relations. Public relations seeks to produce a desired reaction. Journalism seeks to produce a defensible account of reality. The former judges its success by whether the client is pleased. The latter must accept that its subjects, readers and critics may be displeased, sometimes for entirely different reasons.

A journalist who measures his success by the number of people who admire him will become a flatterer. One who measures it by the number of people he offends will become a provocateur. Neither is a particularly useful occupation. The objective must be to write something worth reading, supported by evidence where evidence is required and informed by judgment where judgement is unavoidable.

I did not enter journalism because I wanted to acquire enemies, and I have no particular desire to accumulate them. Nor did I enter it to become the unpaid publicity department of every person who believes his activities deserve greater recognition. I entered it because I discovered, rather late in life, that there was an extraordinary pleasure in observing the world, asking questions and attempting to make sense of what I found.

The pleasure has survived the sycophancy, the insults, the unreasonable demands and the occasional darker manifestations of wounded vanity. Indeed, these experiences have become part of the education. They have taught me something about the peculiar relationship between truth and self-interest, about the fragility of people's public identities and about the resentment that independence can provoke in those who are accustomed to getting their own way.

Above all, they have reminded me that freedom is not simply the absence of a client telling you what to do. It is the willingness to exercise independent judgement when other people are trying, through flattery, obligation, guilt or intimidation, to make that judgement their own.

I spent much of my adult life learning how to speak on behalf of other people. Now, in middle age, I am learning how to speak in my own voice, while recognising that the privilege of doing so carries an obligation to be fair to those about whom I write. It is a curious reversal of professional priorities, and one that I find increasingly satisfying.

I have no illusions that I have mastered journalism. I am still learning its conventions, making mistakes, discovering the peculiarities of its human relationships and occasionally wondering whether the comparative tranquillity of international litigation might have been preferable. Yet every morning there is another blank page, another fascinating person to meet and another question about the world that I would like to answer.

After a lifetime in the law, I find that prospect extraordinarily appealing. And the most delightful part of it is that, finally, nobody gets to tell me what I must write.