By Petra Breyerova
Deputy Editor in Chief, Czech Business Weekly
Prague, Czech Republic
Hosted by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch

During my five-month fellowship program in the United States I learned a wide range of journalistic practices, skills, standards and values that I not only want to use for my own professional development, but also wish to pass them to my colleagues in the Czech Republic. I hope that reporters as well as editors in my home publication Czech Business Weekly (CBW) will understand the benefits of the newly gained knowledge and together with me will strive to make the newspaper a better medium. I also believe that applying certain journalistic standards in my home newspaper can inspire other media in the country to adopt similar standards and so improve Czech journalism in general.

The values and standards I have learned over the past five months range from the newspaper's conception and management to particular reporting and editing skills. In this essay I will focus on four aspects of U.S. journalism I found most appealing and important for public and for further development of the civic society in the Czech Republic. The four most interesting new standards that I have adopted as a reporter and plan to introduce in CBW are related to investigative journalism, style and structure of stories, the role of editors in the newspaper, and the use of photography and graphics in addition to reporting. I will describe how these innovative standards can be implemented in CBW and how they would boost the newspapers' quality.

I have learned that what is described as investigative journalism in the Czech Republic has nothing to do with real investigation conducted by reporters in the United States. Czech reporters usually write what their sources tell them, sometimes based on provided documents. But they hardly ever investigate how and why things happened and why the information has been leaked and so miss the bigger story. That's why politicians sometimes use journalists to damage the reputation of their opponents through media.

During my fellowship I learned what investigative journalism is about. Any investigative story in the United States must have facts and figures to prove and support the key information. These facts are usually investigated by journalists who interview dozens of people, search extensive databases and public records or use computer assisted reporting to get the core of the story. Although access to public records and databases is very limited in my country compared to the United States, I still believe journalists should strive to go beyond just reporting what sources have told or shown them.

In my home newspaper I want to start writing more investigative stories and use new techniques like computer assisted reporting and database searches that I learned in the United States. I will also study the new amendment of Act on Free Access to Information that should make more public records in the Czech Republic accessible to journalists. Based on my knowledge of the law I will try to make relevant institutions cooperate on providing required data.

Through writing these stories I hope to get more recognition and become an example for my peers in the newsroom. I will also encourage CBW reporters to work on investigative stories and will supervise their work so they will be able to learn new techniques and style from me. The main reason for implementing real investigative journalism in my newspaper and my country is to make politicians, institutions and corporations accountable, and the business and political environment more transparent.

Regarding the structure of stories I would like to train reporters and editors to understand better the Associated Press style and teach them how to follow the AP style guide. Though CBW has been trying to use AP style it has never been consistent and careful in following the guide. As I have managed to grasp AP style and improved my writing of news stories as well as features and narrative pieces, I can supervise the correct use of AP style in the CBW newsroom.

Prior to joining AFPF I thought that stories that are published in CBW are in line with U.S. standards. But when I started submitting articles to my editors at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, where I was a business reporter for five months, I realized that my style is far from meeting local standards.

For example, attributions are used more carefully and transparently. Reporters must mention whether a source said certain facts in an email, statement, or sometimes even on the phone. The only acceptable word to report what a source said is "said." In my newspaper we use also other verbs like "admitted, explained or mentioned," that can be misleading and inaccurate.

As CBW is purely a business publication, reporters including me focus on passing the basic information, facts and numbers. We think little about making an article a real story that is pleasant to read. We also don't include much human angles in our stories so the articles are often "dry" and not easy to read. I have learned to include individual people in business stories to show how certain news or trends impact real people.

Instead of just reporting figures and facts I have learned to explain this data in a simple way and use examples that are understandable to public. For example, when I wrote a story on a new partnership between the St. Louis Housing Authority and two non-profit groups that provide mortgages for people living in public housing and enable them to become homeowners, I showed how the cooperation works on a real person. I told readers how a poor mother of five kids managed to become a homeowner instead of just describing the partnership, as I would normally do.

I also discovered a narrative way of writing stories. Narrative stories are usually about a single universal truth or emotion that becomes a center idea of the article. Although this style is difficult to use for business stories, I will try to practice it at home and will certainly continue to use at least some narrative techniques such as describing a certain setting in my articles.

The only way I can implement these innovative techniques in my home newspaper is to start using them myself and become an example for others. Once I publish several stories using these techniques I will ask reporters and editors to comment on the new style. It will depend on whether they will like the innovations or not. If so, it will be easier to set the new techniques and style as the CBW standards.

When I return home in the fall I will immediately update the CBW style guide to be in line with AP and other U.S. standards. However, it might take several months until reporters and editors get used to these changes. It will be up to me and my editor, Jana Mlcochova, to check on reporters and editors to follow the style guide thoroughly.

Thirdly, I would like to focus on strengthening the position of editors in CBW newsroom in terms of introducing more changes in stories and making them better. At the Post-Dispatch, journalists including me worked closely with editors on developing stories. It was common to discuss certain articles several times before they were written and change their angles if new facts appeared. Despite that cooperation it happened sometimes that once the story was filed an editor would introduce changes, send a reporter to add certain information or add more facts. However, editors would never change anything in the story without discussing it with the author.

In CBW as well as other Czech newspapers, the role of editors is much weaker and they usually function as copy editors correcting grammar and spelling rather than improving the content, style and credibility of articles.

Although my editor in chief and I have been trying to make CBW editors more involved with stories, the task has been quite difficult due to the lack of human resources, time and money. With the new energy, skills and enthusiasm I have gained through AFPF I believe we can work out a way to introduce changes to editors' responsibilities. This process could include hiring new people and getting more editors on board. Having good editors who are able to recognize weak points in a story and introduce changes that make a story better is crucial for the newspapers' overall quality and credibility.

The last aspect of U.S. journalism I admired while working in the Post-Dispatch was the enormous effort to publish a lot of graphics and pictures with stories. I found this particularly important for business articles that are usually difficult to illustrate. Editors in the Post-Dispatch encouraged reporters all the time to think about possible graphic options. Any trend can be shown in a bar graph, any market proportion can be depicted in a pie chart. If the story is for example about a particular building it is good to have a map showing the location.

Though CBW does not have human resources to do charts or a map for every story I will try to introduce at least one or two graphic items in each newspaper and will encourage reporters to think more about graphics when they work on stories. CBW designers as well as reporters are perfectly capable of doing this kind of work but they just have to start thinking differently.

Regarding photos it will be a much harder task for me to change the style in our newspaper. As a business publication we use mainly "illustration pictures" as opposed to "reporting or documentary photography" used in the Post-Dispatch. For example, when CBW writes about new types of cell phones a photographer would take a beautiful picture of the device in a studio. The Post-Dispatch photographer would go out in the streets and photograph a real person calling from the phone. Then he would ask the person what her or his name was, whom she or he called and how she or he liked the phone. In the United States photographers are also reporters whose work complements the story.

I have to admit that most photos published with my stories have made them much stronger and added value and information to my reporting. It was interesting to see how a good photo and a caption can make a story much better. The caption written by a photographer can sometimes be a little story within the big story.

Making CBW photographers think this way will be hard as they are used to certain standards and might require money for the additional work. Nevertheless, I will try to persuade them to think as reporters when taking pictures for my stories. It will be a long-term and onerous task to change photographers' perception of work in my newspaper as well as the whole country.

I have listed four aspects of U.S. journalism that I found most interesting, important and possible to implement in my home newspaper. There have been other values and standards I have discovered or learned but most of them would not be possible to implement in my newspaper at this point. One example is hiring headliners or forbidding reporters to accept any kind of freebies.

It is difficult to say how much time it will take me and my editor to implement the four described aspects in my home newspaper and whether we will succeed at all. Although I am planning to do an initial training for reporters and editors to introduce the style changes in CBW when I return this fall, it may be about six months until reporters and editors get used to the updated style guide.

Regarding the innovative way of doing investigative journalism, it may take reporters up to a year to at least try one story and they may not succeed the first time.

As for the graphics, I will talk to designers first and see how much more time they will need to spend on doing one or two graphic items per week. I believe we can start using more charts and graphs in CBW this fall.

Despite the fact that it will not be an easy task to introduce and adopt innovations in CBW, I hope that within a year I will succeed at least with some ideas and make the newspaper a better publication following AP style and U.S. journalism standards. I also believe that in the future CBW can become a journalism standard setter for the whole country.