Woman Who Fell From the Sky - Jennifer Steil [18]
We began by discussing the role of newspapers, the definition of news, kinds of stories, and how to cover a beat, but I ended up talking about a much wider variety of subjects than I had planned, because they had so many questions. Shyness and modesty are prized in Yemeni women, so Theo had warned me the girls might not be as vocal. Yet Zuhra was one of my most avid interrogators. “What do you think of anonymous sources? Do we have to put a byline on a story if we worry it could get us killed? What’s the difference between news and features?” She was relentless. She was, in short, a true journalist.
But I didn’t want my class to be all talk, theory without practice. “I want to get all of you out of this office and onto the streets,” I told them. “News doesn’t happen in this building.”
“How do you find stories on the streets?” they asked. They told me they left the office mainly to go to press conferences. It didn’t occur to them that their corner grocer or a taxi driver or the local midwife might give them an idea for a story. Only press spokesmen and politicians were deemed worthy of quoting. Yet I knew from long experience that PR people and those in power were the least likely to have a good story. I would have to explain to my reporters how to wire a beat, how to cultivate sources, and how to convince people to trust them. I added these to my list of essential things to teach them, which was growing longer by the minute. I was starting to sweat.
And then the women told me that they weren’t really allowed to approach men on the streets. And that they couldn’t ride in cars with men. This meant that if a woman went out to report a story, she had to take a separate taxi from the photographer (all of whom were male).
“What are your other major barriers to getting stories?” I asked, curious.
“Well, no one wants to talk to reporters,” said Farouq. “Or give us their name.”
“That is a problem.” It seemed it wasn’t just this group of reporters who needed to know the various ways the press could serve society, it was the entire society itself. Almost all of Yemen’s newspapers were blatantly partisan, and so anyone interviewed would of course assume a reporter had an agenda other than the truth.
I planned to assign them stories that they could publish in the paper, coaching them along the way. I wanted everything I taught them to contribute to the betterment of the Yemen Observer. There was much that needed bettering, starting with the English. For example: “The security source denied any dead incidents happened during the riots.” Or, from another reporter, “Nemah Yahia, an elderly lady, said that they went to a mill in Raid, have an hour takes them, to crash the cereal.” I suppose that “crash the cereal” isn’t all that inappropriate a phrase to describe what occurs at a mill. But still.
Then there was the utter lack of structure to the stories, the dearth of legitimate sources, the three-paragraph-long sentences, and the nonsensical headlines. One notorious headline in the Observer, before my time, accidentally referred to the Ministry of Tourism as the Ministry of Terrorism. The folks at the U.S. embassy were so entertained by this that they pinned the story to their bulletin board. It was hard to know where to begin, but I figured I couldn’t go wrong by starting with the country’s biggest news story.
“There’s a presidential election coming up in September,” I said. “What role do you think a newspaper can play in the months before the elections? What are its obligations to its readers? In other words, how does the press contribute to the creation of a true democracy?”
The mention of democracy immediately perked them all up. The Yemeni government is officially quite keen on democracy and forever issuing statements about the glorious progress of its march toward such a political system. Yet at the moment, true democracy is but a speck on the horizon. Yemen has existed as