Katerina Voutsina won the OPC Foundation’s
2015 S&P Award for Economic and Business Reporting and has a Foundation
fellowship with the Wall Street Journal in Brussels. She is a
student at Tufts University, majoring in European political economy.
“So what do you think about Greece? Will they leave the eurozone?”
asked my interviewee on a late June afternoon. “I really don’t know,” I
replied. “We all ask the same question.”
I was aware that making small talk in Brussels after having
introduced myself as a Greek reporter would never be easy.
We were standing in front of the European Council building, where
Greece had faced its creditors in countless meetings. Greek banks had been
closed, and European officials were sending conflicting messages about the
upcoming Greek referendum result.
The word “Grexit” has dominated my reporting on the Greek debt
crisis since 2010.
In June 2011, I was reporting from Syntagma Square in Athens for a
Greek political daily. Police had just fired tear gas to disperse the
demonstrators, and I was choking for air with tears streaming from my eyes.
Inside the parliament lawmakers were voting on austerity measures aimed at
averting the euro area’s first sovereign default.
Over the summer, I spent hours at the doorstep of European
institutions. I listened to hundreds of different voices on the future of a
country – my country – that was again teetering on the brink of bankruptcy.
To small-talk questions, I had no ready answers. In Brussels
politics, there are no such answers. That’s why good reporting is difficult. It
demands patience, erudition and humility.
Brussels reporting demanded something more: becoming
an outsider. I was not.