Covering Trump and Kim: Scrambling to cover a non-news story

BY GRACE LEE

A Trump-Kim summit is every planning producer’s nightmare. When news of a second meeting broke — to be held in Hanoi, after last June’s Singapore summit — many of my colleagues and fellow journalists resorted to buying multiple plane tickets to different cities and different dates, due to the uncertainty and secrecy surrounding where and when the summit would take place.

Up until mere hours before the actually two-day summit happened, the venue was shrouded in mystery, and contingency plans were put in place just in case. Details like that encapsulate just how bizarre it has been for reporters like myself, covering the meetings between North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and U.S. President Donald Trump. They’re unlike any other news event that I’ve reported on in the past.

I arrived in Hanoi on Saturday, February 23, less than a week before the summit dates. I packed light; no heavy DSLR cameras or big tripods — just a multimedia kit that would allow me to turn around and immediately record if breaking news were to happen.

I had a list of prospective story ideas and an extensive shotlist of file footage, but was prepared to throw all of that out the window depending on the flow of the news in the next few days. It wasn’t until the day before my flight that I was notified that my Vietnamese visa had been approved, and even then the process of physically obtaining the visa was chaotic and confusing at the Hanoi airport.

My colleagues had told me the application approvals were taking so long because Vietnamese officials were literally faxing the documents one by one. The sudden influx of media and journalists had clogged their system.

At the Reuters bureau in Hanoi, many of my colleagues had already arrived from Singapore, Seoul, Tokyo and elsewhere. We had been planning for weeks, but even so, there was a nervous air of uncertainty as we sketched out the next couple of days. What would the two leaders possibly talk about? What happens if they don’t reach a deal?

There was also pressure to find new and interesting ways to cover this summit in a way that wouldn’t be repetitive to Singapore. But it felt for me like many of the questions we were asking this time around were the same as the last; there hadn’t really been much notable progress between the two sides since June 2018.

Our task this time was to try and look past the pageantry and see if Kim and Trump make tangible agreements beyond just sweeping statements about denuclearization. But of course, that wouldn’t happen.

On its second day, the summit fell apart. Both leaders rushed away without comment, and at the media center there was a frenzy to find out what happened or more specifically — what went wrong.

Hours later, at his press conference, Trump said one of his most memorable quotes from Hanoi: “Sometimes you have to walk, and this was just one of those times.”

The day had taken a turn that we hadn’t expected, and analysts from around the globe were trying to figure out what this would mean for the relationship between North Korea and the U.S. But in the chaos, we still managed to report on some of our best stories from the summit — including the dismantling of the Metropole hotel venue moments after the meeting was called off. The lunch the two leaders were supposed to share was left cold and decorations were swiftly taken down.

Covering the Trump-Kim summits have made for long and unpredictable days at work, but if I were to take a time machine and tell my past-self in journalism school that I’d be reporting on meetings between U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, grad-school me would probably say ‘stop smoking whatever it is you’re smoking.’

So, at least my job is interesting.

Grace Lee covers Asia for Reuters.