There are three stages of journalistic understanding.
- You don’t understand the subject, but are full of infectious enthusiasm. That’s when you write the “Cure for cancer” stories
- You could pass an exam in the subject, and it shows.
- You could pass an exam in the subject, but no normal reader would suspect.
It takes a long time to reach the third stage, but it’s the only one that counts unless you can stay forever ignorant, and not all journalists can manage that.