By Sarah Namulondo
Associate Editor, The Sunday Monitor
Kampala, Uganda

News that I was a 2002 Alfred Friendly Press Fellow was exciting. A chance to visit the United States was good, but a chance to work at an American newspaper was a bonus.

I knew it would be a tough task, but I thought I was up to it. After all, Americans report in English and I had been speaking the language since I was a kid.

In the same breath, I knew exactly what I wanted: to hone my journalistic skills and write to the standards of the western world. I had been reading The New York Times and The Guardian online and I longed to write those fluid and engaging stories.

Here was my chance.

As I was later to find out, practicing journalism in the United States goes beyond being proficient in the English language. It requires focus and a strong will. But above all, it requires ambition and the desire to excel.

The test was a story about a company that wanted to build a new Walgreen’s store in the city of Clayton, but the city officials were against the idea. It was a simple local story, but one that could go terribly wrong if either party was rubbed the wrong way.

Clayton officials contended that the Walgreen’s structures were too “institutionalized” and thus didnn’t meet Clayton’s standards. The store proponents said the structure would meet the standards. They stood to lose a lot of money, so I found the story very delicate.

The zones editor assigned me the story because the reporter who normally writes such stuff was on vacation. She was also filling in for another editor, so she wasn’t very sure about the particulars of the story, but it was needed very soon. I wasn’t conversant with the issues at stake because I couldn’t tell how “institutionalized” a building could be.

American newspapers have online libraries but even after perusing through all the earlier stories, I was none the wiser.

I told the editor that possibly I was the wrong person to do the story, because the conflict was too “St. Louisan” for me to decipher. She looked me in the eye and told me to give it my best. I wrote the story. Lesson one: I could execute an assignment, if only I believed in my abilities.

Newspapers in the United States care deeply for their readers. In Uganda, we always chase that “big angle” or the “big name” because we believe it’s what captures the audience’s attention.

The story was about Kevin Cherilla, training partner of Erik Weihenmayer, the first blind climber to scale Mount Everest, who was in town to inspire some visually impaired kids.

“Make sure to enter the world of a visually impaired kid … that’s the gist of the story,” Ron Harris, one of the metropolitan editors told me before I left. How about Cherilla, I inquired.

“Nobody cares about him; people want to know about the life of a visually impaired kid.”

Lesson two: Take care of the readers’ interests and practice what the Americans term “intimate journalism.”

While pursuing our daily journalistic practices, we are always reminded of the three canons of our trade—accuracy, fairness and objectivity.

But before coming to the United States, I had never really felt the importance of what it means to be accurate. The facts had to be true, yes, but the gravity of double checking a name or a figure had never struck me as it has these past five months. During a routine assignment, I received a call at 11:00 p.m. to verify the spelling of a school kid’s name. Apparently, my spelling differed from what the photographer had written. But because I had learned my lesson (thanks to University of Maryland journalism professor Chris Callahan), I had asked the kid to spell the name for me and I had cross checked it with his teacher. My version carried the day. Lesson three: No detail is inconsequential.

When we are brought to the United States to observe how a free press operates, it’s under the premise that where we come from, we are not free to write just about anything. This is true for a country like Uganda.

While at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in early October, I learned that my home newspaper, The Monitor, had been shut down because it had published a story that had angered the government officials. There’s an unwritten law in Uganda that nothing should be written criticizing the army. As it was, The Monitor wrote about the army and it was closed down for a week.

When I checked the story on The Monitor's website, I figured that the paper was somehow at fault. My stint at the Post-Dispatch has taught me that it is not fair to run a story where more than three sources aren’t willing to be on record. If The Monitor had failed to get the officials on record, the story should have delayed for a day or two.

And with all the facts in hand, the government would have had no grounds to close the paper. So, while the contention is that the press is free in the United States, journalists here work hard to maintain the rules.

Finally, in light of television and radio competition (the internet is not widespread in Uganda), it’s been an invaluable lesson to learn how to craft stories a little different from the hard news style I was accustomed to. I’ve learned some techniques to attract readers who already have an idea of an event. Basically what editors at the Post-Dispatch call “featurizing” the news event by putting a delayed lead on a story.

This is what I’m taking with me to Uganda. As associate editor for the Sunday Monitor, it will be my duty to aspire for accurate, balanced and fair stories. How? By working closely with the reporters—briefing them before an assignment and debriefing them before the actual writing. This is what my editor Marcia Koenig used to do. She would ask whenever I had a story to write: “What have we got?” That simple question would make me think through the story long before I typed it out on computer. What a gift!