The right to get it wrong

A young journalist in Sharjah has just been given her first signed column.

For three years she checked other people's facts, tidied their sentences and wrote headlines for stories she had not chosen. When a column turned out to be wrong, the letters went to the writer. It was comfortable, in its way. She could never be wrong. Only the people whose names sat at the top could.

Now her name sits at the top. She will have to pick a side on things that are not settled, and some weeks she will pick badly. Readers will say so. Her editor will remember.

It is tempting to see that as the downside of being trusted. It is actually the whole point of it.

Every famous misjudgement in history belongs to someone who was in a position to judge in the first place. Every columnist who called it wrong had a column. A record of being wrong is also a record of having been allowed to choose.

Plenty of people arrange their working lives to avoid that. They look for a place where somebody else decides, so that nothing can land on them. It is safe. It is also small, and over the years it shrinks the person who chose it.

She may well get some of her first columns wrong. If she does, she will learn what she actually thinks faster than three more years of checking other people's work could teach her.

Being the one who can make the mistake is not a burden attached to the work. It is what makes the work worth doing.