By Betty Abah
Senior Staff Writer, TELL magazine
Lagos, Nigeria
Hosted by the Rocky Mountain News

The day I wore my sweatshirt inside out to the newsroom of the Rocky Mountain News, in Colorado, remained one of the most memorable for me in the course of my six-month stint in the USA as an Alfred Friendly Fellow. It was my first week, and my first clash with the American punctuality culture. I was racing against time, which no one has enough to waste here.

You would struggle like I did, if you came from a background where journalists wait for three hours for government officials or other VIPs to turn up at events, and where most people seem at peace with the “African time” syndrome. I not only learned to be punctual at great pains to my neck but to digest the core values of journalism ethics and style, many of which I thought I had “mastered” before my American adventure.

As other Fellows have noticed, getting a person’s name properly spelled means a lot, as is getting every other minute detail accurate. I remember writing my first story, an obit about a remarkable geriatrician. My enthusiasm whittled after a phone chat with the deceased’s daughter. She expressed anger that I didn’t get her siblings states of residence right. Just as I have, reporters back home can learn a thing or two from these.

Speaking of obits, I probably hit a jackpot of ideas when I encountered Jim Sheeler, the Rocky Mountain News’ reporter who won a Pulitzer for his obit writing, during the course of my fellowship. Through Sheeler’s writings and others I came to read in the US, I realized that the obit page is not meant to be an exclusive reserve of the rich and famous. I had yet another brainwave: back home, we could use obits as a tool for the much needed accountability in Nigeria and Africa. In doing that, the “dead beat” would no longer be a patronizing profile of the important dead. And, poor but influential fellows who have wriggled out of this “painful world” at last, would feature in it, and objective and well-researched writing would carry the day.

It’s why attending the Great Obit Writers Conference in Las Vegas, New Mexico in June, 2006 and addressing an audience of famous obit editors and reporters drawn from the US, the United Kingdom and Canada, became one of the highlights of my fellowship. As you must have guessed, my paper’s title was Holding the Corrupt Dead Accountable, Celebrating the Wretched of the Earth: A Case for Obit Writing in Africa.

Yet, as one of two recipients of the AFPF’s inaugural fellowships in health reporting, I was supposed to be writing stories that would revive the dead. I did my bit. Being keenly interested in issues concerning HIV/AIDS, the new global monster, AFPF afforded me a great opportunity to know about it, concentrate on other health issues, get tips on health reporting and learn how to source the abundant resources that lie mostly untapped on the Internet. How else could I have gained access into the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (at the Knight Health Reporters’ Boot camp in Atlanta, Georgia), watched a dog undergo surgery for stomach cancer (at the Animal Cancer Center in Fort Collins, Colorado), or stood inches from the enigmatic Bill Clinton (at the 16th International AIDS Conference in Toronto).

That historical gathering in Canada, and the knowledge gathered from there, took my fellowship to another level: the resolve to open an HIV research library back home, where the public can come get information so as to make informed and responsible choices, stay alive and healthy knowing AIDS is not yet done with humanity. No matter how small that effort, it is my hope that it will help minimize the daily surge of people joining the 40 million infected in the global community, or the 20 million consumed in the last 25 years. Information is power, is life.

And, it’s not only human beings that are in a survival contest. Newspapers are, too. I am privileged (not in a cynical sort of way) to witness one of the defining moments of American journalism with many newspapers fighting the battles of their lives against the fast-spinning Internet. In many developing nations, where reporters still write in longhand and many publishers are not yet decided whether to establish web pages, the “American media revolution” as I see it, will be a lesson for us to wake from our journalistic slumber and go the way of the (advanced) world-Internet. Editors and newspaper owners back home need to go to work, not only to maximize the gains of the phenomenal Internet but to be prepared to tackle the challenges it also offers--when adverts, the life-blood of any paper, boycott the blurry newsprints in preference for the glitzy, less expensive “net.”

My one-week spell at The Poynter Institute in Florida (with the seven other Fellows), to study at the feet of the masters, was significant. Roy Peter Clark, the guru, gave me a priceless gem in the form of “50 Tools.” Now, I can tell others back home that by ‘letting subordinate elements branch off to the right,’ their reports would make more points.

And, while watching my editors dismember my (“stylistic”) stories and convert them into everyday language, I came to appreciate the wisdom in one of my former editor’s scolding: “This is not a literary magazine!” Now, like the American reporters whom I have always admired, I can write with candor without necessarily making an adjective-saturated mystery novel out of an elementary school resumption day’s story. Or a cat trapped in between two crumbled buildings in New York! (Yes, that’s big news in the US.) Poor Molly.

As John Ensslin, my great and benign mentor at the Rocky would say, “Write as if you are having a conversation with someone.” In teaching these ideas to colleagues, I don’t have to take a high-horse position. I will use the delicate diplomacy of my editors at the Rocky who would ask me, “Are you okay with this correction? Are you happy with this?” after “scattering” my prose. How flattered I always felt! How effective I would be if I don’t turn out a dictatorial editor from whom reporters dodge from colliding with in the hallway, not to mention entering his/her (hallowed) office!

I may not agree in total with American journalism’s “localization” of the media, to the detriment of stories that mirror lives, cultures and trends in most other countries (except, of course, it’s tragic, most times). But I admit that the practice of focusing on everyday people in the community and bringing their issues to the front page goes a long way to forge communal spirit and give people a sense of importance, and is copy worthy.

For once, politicians can take a backseat. Journalism, after all, is all about people, big or small. That’s why I am now interested in the typical truck driver who infected his wife with HIV/AIDS, straight from his mobile mistresses in towns around Nigerian oil depots, and the health of the little boy on a Lagos swamp with no access to electricity or health care, though he lives a few meters away from the rich and powerful on the adjacent Peninsula. That’s why I am now wary of politicians, and would believe their grandiose speeches only when I have verified them from several ‘impeccable sources.’

AFPF is, surely, an opportunity of a lifetime. It’s one that every journalist from a developing country, lucky to have age on his/her side (25-35 years), should covet. No one passes through it without the refinements, professionalism and grace that American journalism represents, rubbing off on them. I am lucky to have been there.

Thank you, Alfred!