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IRP Fellows and World Press Institute Journalists Share Notes on Toughest Reporting Challenges

By Alex Selim, SAIS ’08, Journalism and Media Career Club

WASHINGTON, September 27, 2006 — Ten international journalists from the World Press Institute (WPI) and the eight U.S. journalists in the International Reporting Project met today to discuss their most challenging stories at a roundtable meeting at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), the home of the IRP Fellowships.

Rusudan Tsereteli, a WPI Fellow who is editor-in-chief of the independent newspaper Rustavi-Info in the former Soviet republic of Georgia, launched the discussion by observing that reporters in countries like hers which restrict press freedom must be willing to take great risks. Tsereteli said she once received a phone call from a person threatening to kidnap her son if she reported a story exposing a corrupt cabinet member. After sending her son and her mother into hiding in another city, she published the article anyway and distributed the issue for free. She also spoke of the challenges of reporting in Chechnya, when she had to bribe Russian soldiers with Georgian vodka in order to enter the restricted zone.

Another WPI Fellow, Semantics King Jr., recounted his ordeal as a journalist in his native Liberia. He was a radio show host who challenged a government official about his response to a series of rapes that occurred in Liberia’s airport. On his way from his studio he was beaten unconscious and thrown into a ditch during a failed kidnapping attempt. Fearing for his life, he fled that same night and crossed the border to neighboring Ivory Coast. King eventually moved to Ghana, where he founded an online newsletter for Liberian refugees.

Not all of the journalists’ stories involved physical danger. Katie Thomas, a reporter for Newsday and an IRP Fellow, faced an ethical dilemma after spending a year and a half following two recovering victims of domestic violence who left their partners and were starting over. She used pseudonyms for her subjects and omitted identifying details to protect their safety. Although her newspaper disclosed the name changes and omissions, she struggled with some of the editorial and ethical issues involved in telling this story.

“You can break a great story but can you really survive the impact of the story?” Lu Hongyong, a business writer for the China Daily in Shanghai, said, observing that sometimes the challenge of reporting can come after an article is published. When he wrote a story about a fired Chinese WTO negotiator who criticized his former bosses, the Chinese foreign ministry devoted an entire press conference to refuting the charges.

Mamadou Thior, a Senegalese editor and WPI fellow described how modern technology was changing reporting in his country. In recent elections, a group of young journalists in Senegal used their mobile phones to report election results from each polling station instantaneously, avoiding post-election vote count disputes that in the past often led to violence. “We’re doing a job where today you can be seen as a reporter and tomorrow you can be seen as a devil. When that happens, you know you are doing a good job,” said Thior. “No one should divert you from your objective: to tell the truth.”

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