Doing Journalism in Ghana
A Journalist’s Diary
I’ve teased it often enough. It’s time to show you one of my early journalism experiences. What follows below is a story I wrote for one of my favorite Quinnipiac classes on feature writing. It’s a story about a month I spent in Accra, Ghana, volunteering/interning for a small weekly newspaper.
Eventually, I’ll write more about that month, but I still need to find the time to work through my journal from that time. So for now, here’s a slice of raw Ghanaian journalism in the form of an exercise in writing an immersion/experiential story. And next week, I’ll have a new edition of What I’m Reading waiting alongside a new Fun With Cameras.
Heat filled the air inside a dusty old van to Kwame Nkrumah Circle, the first stop on my way to the copy shop that doubled as the publishing house for The National Trust, a weekly newspaper in Accra, Ghana.
The airflow that streamed through the wide holes, where one would usually find windows, alleviated the pressure the heat and the humidity had put on me. With two weeks already under my belt, navigating through Ghana’s public transportation system felt natural. But I knew I still stood out among the Ghanaians around me. The light color of my skin labeled me as a stranger.
I saw Kwame Penni, the editor of The National Trust, through the window of the copy shop as I closed in on the one-story building. The sun weighed me down with every step I took. It was 9 a.m. in August, which meant it was winter in Ghana. But with temperatures usually around 90 degrees and a humidity of at least 80 percent, every step I took felt like the final mile of a marathon.
The air conditioner in the crammed one-room building was losing its fight against the heat, but it provided a relief for the first few seconds. Penni sat on the battered couch, his back toward the entrance. His right hand flew as he wrote on a 4-by-10 slip of paper. I knew what that meant. In a few minutes I had to decrypt the boss’s handwriting, a challenge I had learned to deal with by then.
Theo Alfreds, The Trust’s managing editor, removed his reading glasses, turned his head upward, and said, “Morning, Florian. Make yourself comfortable; we’ve got a lot to accomplish today.”
He, too, had one of those long paper slips on his lap. A newspaper laid scattered across the coffee table in-between the couches that we called newsroom.
Susannah Sconce stood out from the rest of the group as well. I could only see the back of the young Brit, but the blonde hair that ran down her shoulder, touching her arm gave her away.
The room was roughly 25 feet wide and 65 feet deep. Desks with outdated computers hugged the walls in a semicircle, arranged just behind our improvised newsroom. The yellow paint on the walls was peeling here and there.
Susannah stared at the screen of an antiquated plastic iMac. The frustration in her eyes was typical for us Westerners. “Morning, Susannah,” I said. “Don’t worry. I’ll have my laptop running in a sec.”
I pulled a chair, sat down, and retrieved the laptop from my orange backpack. While waiting for the machine to boot, I glanced around and noticed that the handful of copy shop employees was focused on their jobs. They had to work with outdated technology, but it was enough for them to be productive.
The screen of my laptop dawned to life. I realized that my MacBook Pro compared to the equipment The Trust worked with like Star Trek warp engines compared to horse-drawn carriages. I don’t know what I would have done without my trusty laptop.
Susannah turned around, a stack of paper slips in her hand — publishing Wednesday, as we called these gatherings, could begin. I handed my laptop over to my fellow intern for the first task on our agenda.
Unlike in German schools, touch-typing is taught at English schools, which made it more efficient if she transcribed the handwritten stories. I felt comfortable honing my English-pronunciation and handwriting-deciphering skills by reading the collected articles to her. We slimmed down the stack quickly, despite an occasional guessing game that interrupted the symphony of reading and typing whenever my deciphering skills failed me.
Once we had completed step one in our approach to bring out this week’s paper, I pulled the thumb drive from the USB slot and handed it to Susannah, who then turned it over to one of the copy shop employees.
I joined the editors in the newsroom. As soon as Susannah brought the printouts of the transcribed articles, step two would begin — copyediting.
But Theo had a special task lined up for me.
“Flo, go over to the Internet café. Find us some interesting international stories. Look for photos, anything that stands out. Do you get it?”
The Internet is a scarce resource in Ghana. Neither this nor the standard newsroom, which was nothing more than the patio and living room at Theo’s home, had access. Research was done in Internet cafés.
My assignment was to research stories on the BBC’s website and save them to my thumb drive. Those articles usually filled the gaps that showed up when the editors arranged the stories we had prepared. The Trust usually didn’t care to credit anyone, but we interns didn’t stop trying.
I saw Theo gesturing at photos when I entered the copy shop again. They had found a story about a fire that had appeared in a different newspaper already. They had the story, which they wanted to print with the original byline. I couldn’t see anything specific from my position, but the photos showed burned corpses and body parts. Susannah and I tried to convince them not to run those pictures, but Theo said, “That is what people want to see. Pictures are always good — the more the better. Do you get it?”
We kept tweaking articles, discussing the layout of the pages, and persuading the copy shop staff, which was in charge of the layout software, to accept our decisions. When we interns left around 7 p.m., the editors would stay to oversee the printing.
The next morning, I was walking slowly through the dusty streets of Tesano, a district to the North of the downtown area. My destination was the main newsroom, which wasn’t far from where I lived. But it was still a wise idea to have a water sachet handy to compensate for sweating so heavily in the heat.
I had nearly finished the sachet when Theo greeted me at the door. The broad leaves of a Mango tree protected his patio from the burning morning sun. I sat down and snatched our newest product. One of my responsibilities was to fill the paper’s sports section with content — so I began the usual review of our paper by reading the last page.
“No, this can’t be true,” I thought. My smile disappeared. Something was wrong with the headline I was forced to read over and over. “Sir Alex Ferguson to manage Great Britain’s 2012 Team” — where was the darn question mark? It was there when I left yesterday.
Why was I surprised?
Here, it didn’t matter whether there would be a decision if the UK would form a unified soccer team for the 2012 Olympics. Changes in the content you submitted were something you just had to deal with when doing journalism in Ghana.
