Ryszard Kapuscinski on Herodotus as the first journalist, in Travels with Herodotus.
His task is complex: on the one hand, he knows that the most precious and almost the only source of knowledge is the memory of those he meets; on the other hand, he is aware that this memory is a fragile thing, volatile and evanescent–that memory has a vanishing point. That is why he is in a hurry–people forget, or else move away somewhere and one cannot find them again, and eventually they die.
