By Aresu Eqbali
Reporter, Agence France Presse
Tehran, Iran
Hosted by the Rocky Mountain News

When I applied for this fellowship, I did not know much about the news operation in newspapers and their accessories.

In Iran, I work for a news agency in a 13-staffer office, including the accountant, admin and IT guys, tea-woman and driver. So, when I toured The Washington Post during my first few days in the States, it came to me as a brutal experience. I was overwhelmed with the enormity of the newsroom, its staff and facilities, including the big screen TVs. But I'll bring back home more than my surprise at how big everything is.

My goal in coming here was to use the opportunity to taste journalism from a thoroughly different angle. Though I work in Iran, which has its own idiosyncratic style of journalism, my job experiences as a reporter has always been with Western media reflecting Iran's development to the world. So, I felt it was time for me to broaden my outlook and gain a different perspective on what is called journalism in another country whose people serve as our audience.

Spending time in the atmosphere of the Rocky Mountain News has broadened my mind and improved my journalism skills. During these past few months there were specific moments that I wished I were in my home newsroom to work on this or that story idea. Sometimes, I would remember a story that we had done in my newsroom and I would say to myself that we could have approached it differently.

Here, I will touch upon one of the ideas that will influence my news writing once I return home.

Our office at the Agence France Presse in Tehran is a news agency, competing with other ones like Reuters and Associated Press. There, most things differ from a newspaper or magazine. One of the differences is what we call news and what a newspaper does.

We do not deal with local news or everyday people stories, neither do our regular Iranian newspapers that much, unlike the majority of the American news media. For my news agency, if the temperature tops a triple-digit grade, it is not news. If it causes a week-long wildfire, it’s not news. If the high temperature makes life miserable in a neighborhood, it is still not news. And this is obviously because of the nature of our news agency which has to do with an international audience as opposed to a local one.

In Tehran I have to focus on the big picture news and macro developments because of my news agency's interests. Another element that has contributed to this fashion is lack of adequate human resources to cover a greater number of stories. Beside those stories related to international relations, we basically cover statements and reactions of prominent political, economic, judicial and cultural figures, and a variety of political, economic, cultural and human rights related incidents that are of national as well as international importance and relevance.

At the Rocky Mountain News, for the first time, I came to learn about the role of small lives in the American newsrooms. So, I started the practice of writing about people and not their politicians. Here, I wrote such stories as the small-scale renovation of old houses in a neighborhood or the recovery of a hit-and-run victim under special conditions.

At first, I found these difficult because of the lack of experience. My eyes and ears have been trained to catch national and international issues after all. It would also accordingly seem trivial to me.

This experience however gave me a different perspective about local news that could bear the potential to prove news-worthy in a foreign news agency in my country. Here, I noticed, it is not all about a high-level official speech and stance. It is also important to consider those lives, which one way or another would be affected by that speech and stance. I think one should reflect how a macro decision would affect all walks of life, and not only the international relations.

Our audience at my newsroom, AFP, is basically the world outside and obviously it would not make sense to write about a kitten found under the hood of a used car or the recovery of a hit-and-run victim, as it might have never appeared on the Yahoo news pages, one of the places where our newswire’s output lands.

As an advantage taken from this program, and my stint at the Rocky Mountain News, I now think one should bring a broader aspect to our choice of news and could attach macro developments and small stories together. This attachment could also attract more readers from different parts of the world especially those who are bored of hard-core stories and would put aside an article by a glance at its bleak political or economic headline. The focus on everyday lives has indeed reshaped my view on the big picture news. I realized the importance of relating hard-core stories to a human angle. Spicing up an article with a human approach, which is often forgotten amid the fear of losing the focus—and more importantly the deadline—brings nuances that entice a wider range of readers to engage with the news. Our foreign audience with eyes accustomed to local news could indeed find local news of a country like Iran exotic and intriguing.

Undoubtedly, reporting on local incidents could also serve as a means to introduce my country to the world from a different angle which is one of the goals of a foreign news agency.

In the face of globalization affecting society, local news might have lost their popularity, especially among the younger generation. From what I experienced here, local stories of a country like Iran have their own fans in a country like the United States or the West in general. The interaction with reporters and writers here showed me that we need a closer approach to break the ice between my country and the West. We, as a foreign news agency, would often miss the opportunity of presenting a new and different image of Iran by tightly focusing on the big picture. I realized that understanding of my country is mostly based on a typical introduction at a governmental and official level. Thus, I believe we must step up this approach to bring out Iran from the point of view of its people and their lives to offer a better understanding. Local news would be a translator of the realities in my country, which is usually figured out by the national and international news.

This has changed my point of view with regard to macro development stories. Back home, I will take advantage of this experience and track down stories about ordinary people and lives that I would find intriguing for our audience at my newsroom.

I will discuss my experiences during these past months with my colleagues back home to see what we can use and learn from. And I am sure my editor is very much open to a new approach of this kind.