You KNOW What You Know

I feel kinda foolish admitting that, after 6 years of leading journalism workshops for African reporters, I was actually nervous about coming to Kampala this past week!

Part of the reason is I've been focusing on newspaper journalism this past year in Nairobi. But my fellow Knight Health Fellow in Uganda, a veteran journalist named Chris Conte, wanted me to come over and do a training for radio journalists, because of my NPR background.

Even though it's only been a couple of years, it feels like I'd been away from radio reporting for AGES, and what the heck was I gonna tell those reporters??? Granted, my time in Gulu was spent doing radio training, so it wasn't such a far-fetched proposition. But while I gathered handouts and decided on stories to play during the workshop, I felt a twinge of self-doubt.

And then came Saturday morning, and it was "Show Time," jazz-hands and all. Since I don't get to do workshops in Nairobi (yet), it took a minute to relax and get into the flow of standing in front of a hot, airless conference room where a half dozen or so journalists are regarding you with a mixture of bored skepticism and hopeful expectation.

But you know what you know. It doesn't just disappear. I wasn't the greatest radio reporter who ever lived, but I grasped the most important concepts. And they made a lot of sense; radio reporting is like print reporting--in 3-D. Instead of just writing about the noisy crowd of people, you get to let listeners hear it. Instead of decribing a woman trudging across a gravel road, you get to let listeners hear her crunching footsteps. Instead of reading a woman's quotes about how horrified she was to learn her HIV positive status, listeners get to hear the tremble in her voice.

So for the past few days I've been "beating the drum" so to speak, about how SOUND, STORY AND SCRIPT are the three most important words in radio newsfeatures reporting. And I had a wonderful co-trainer today, a young man named Pius Sawa. I met him at the very first Internews Reporting workshop in Gulu, and I was struck by his deep booming voice, and how earnest his demeanor was. He had never done radio newsfeatures reporting before, but he took everything so seriously.

Well, two years later, Pius has won numerous awards for his features, and is making a comfortable living for himself as a journalist. In the picture above, I'm watching him use Adobe sound editing software on a laptop he was able to buy from his freelance earnings. Yesterday, he finished up a project with the BBC on the fishing industry in Lake Victoria. He's done trainings in Kenya and Tanzania, and he's just a delight to work with. I could tell the reporters were captivated by his stories about how he reported and produced his features.

And when he said he owed it all to Internews...well, actually, he said he owed it all to me and the way I taught him....I wanted to cry. Or maybe it was because I was so hot in that stuffy training room, I was about to pass out. Yeah, that's the reason.