By Rodney Muhumuza
Daily Monitor
Kampala, Uganda
Hosted by The Kansas City Star

On a rainy afternoon nearly a year ago, I got off the phone to punch the air in jubilation, my face beaming with the excitement of a man who has just won the lottery. I didn’t care that such antics, inexplicable at a time when everyone was writing on deadline, stunned reporters in the newsroom. I recall being unable to write anything well past 6 p.m., the restless recipient of good news all the way from Washington, D.C.

It was October 2008 in Kampala, and I had just learnt that I would be joining the 2009 class of Alfred Friendly Fellows, a fantastic opportunity that would lead me to The Kansas City Star. I won’t be punching the air when I return to the corner where I shared a desk with some of my best friends at the Daily Monitor. However, to the extent that I’ll have plenty of stories—interesting or disgusting, hopeful or hopeless—to share, my return will be no less sensational. What’s more, because I’ll be returning from what I consider a successful experience, it will be time to tell my colleagues what they expect to hear: I wish it could have lasted longer. The truth is that I’ll not be telling a lie.

There is something about the Alfred Friendly Press Fellowship that makes an applicant wonder whether its promise—five months spent at an American newsroom, along with the education that comes with immersion in a culture far removed from your own—is more imaginary than actual. Now, as during my earliest days in Kansas City, my answer remains the same: yes, the program is for real. If I am disappointed at all, let it be because I underestimated my own potential to have fun—and to experiment. When it was time to count the triumphs, I had written several stories and columns for The Star, visited at least six newsrooms, attended the annual convention of the Society of Professional Journalists, spoken to college students in Cardondale, interviewed a masthead editor at The New York Times, been interviewed by a radio station, and had my work published in three American newspapers.

From a cultural perspective, I was accepted into the homes of several friends, cursed by readers angry over my Detroit Free Press column about the obsession with pets in America, and asked repeatedly what I knew about the dictator everyone called Idi Amin. And, in that good old American tradition, I wound up embracing the kind of profanity that sometimes guaranteed sanity. It’s ridiculous to think of the program in purely professional terms, as such pigeonholing would be a blatant denial of the cultural consciousness that comes with participating in it. Even if I eventually wrote a respectable number of stories, I had decided from the beginning that it would be pointless to measure success in terms of story count. The best measure, I determined, was to be found in how wide I kept my eyes and ears—everywhere I went. And so, in keeping with my conspiracy, I listened as reporters recorded voicemail, eavesdropped on conversations between editors and reporters, and moved around three desks (metro, features and op-ed) to get an idea of how each works. There was a lot to take in, and there were disappointments, such as when I went through a period of disillusionment while in The Star’s features department.

I wrote in my application to the program that I wanted to improve my aptitude for investigative reporting, and that I wanted to observe how copy editors and reporters work together to produce fine copy, or at least copy that’s devoid of the mistakes that we, back at the Monitor, rail against when we open the pages to reveal egregious errors. To be sure, the expectations were unlimited. Through my interactions with several journalists, at The Star or elsewhere, I heard that patience was the most important virtue in the realm of investigative reporting. It was a critical message to give a reporter who’s from a newsroom where too much premium is placed on quick delivery of content, sometimes at the expense of quality.

My goals had been set in the context of the Monitor newsroom, but it was important to proceed from the realization that The Star and the Monitor are in the same business—of reporting accurate news, of beating deadlines. What’s different is how (and why) they approach editorial business they way they do. As obvious as that sounds, stating it is my way of accepting those differences, and of taking a heavily nuanced approach to bringing change to my newsroom. It’s another way to explain that some of what I learnt is for my own information, that it may never be applied to my newsroom, and, inevitably, that I am lucky to have been selected for the program. And I would be dishonest not to acknowledge that The Star, for all its greatness, isn’t a perfect newsroom; for example, I found the paper’s phone-intensive newsgathering operation formulaic, occasionally devoid of the sweaty intensity that’s the joy of hanging out on the streets.

Yet there are issues that the Monitor can’t afford to ignore. In a presentation at the Poynter Institute, and in numerous exchanges with friends, I said that the most important things I have learnt are (A) the need to keep it simple when writing news and (B) the necessity for reporters and copy editors to ditch animosity and work together. We often find ourselves handicapped by a need to report news from the old, inverted-pyramid scheme of things, ignoring windows into creativity and the pull of our senses. Then, having quickly disappeared into the night after filing our stories, leaving copy editors to excel at tinkering, we return the next morning to complain that errors were introduced. I am a believer in the idea that reporters must, and should, look at their copy before it goes to print, if the errors that shock us the next morning are to be eliminated. These are the subjects I’ll raise with my editors and colleagues, the same subjects that will inform the journalistic workshops I intend to hold. I’ll carry loads of literature—books and handouts about good reporting and fine writing—that I’ll encourage my colleagues to read. And I’ll try to lead by example, making sure my output reflects my experience.

More recently, I’ve added a third lesson to my list, which is that the Monitor has to start valuing feedback in ways it has never done before. I wrote on my blog, madeinuganda.blogspot.com, that it was wrong for a newspaper that’s not even 20 years old to be aloof to feedback. “In Uganda, where state tyranny over the media is sometimes taken for granted, reporters know they are doing a good job when the state comes down hard on them,” I wrote. “It has become one crucial, if painful, way of measuring influence, yet one that ultimately shows a blithe disregard for what the ordinary Ugandan thinks. If we are as good as we think we are, our journalism should not merely aspire to draw the wrath of angry dictators. Above all, it should get the local people, the silent ones, talking.”

That statement may in fact be a distillation of my experience. We need to aspire to a journalistic culture that pays more attention to the communities, journalism that deliberately gives a voice to the voiceless. To put it bluntly, we must cover the labor of gravediggers as energetically as we report the machinations of politicians. Inherent in that mantra is the admission that I am still a work in progress.