30 January 2006

It’s alive!

Sorry to alarm everyone. It’s just been really busy here. Despite the power going out; only having a staff of three reporters; only having two designers – one who had a problem getting to work, the other not knowing how to design a newspaper; despite the U.S. government taking over our offices two mornings during our last production week (we are squatting in the Voice of America bureau and some folks were in town from Washington so we had to get out); despite the power going out repeatedly; and despite a wall nearly collapsing (it’s now leaning a little, but into the store next door so it will fall on them. No biggie) the first issue of Focus hits the streets this week.

That’s assuming Vincent the designer gets to Kampala tomorrow morning with files the printers can use. That was our latest disaster this morning. I got a fairly panicked call from Shyaka saying that the printers couldn’t open the files. Ruined my whole day. I text-messaged Bec saying I thought I’d go play in traffic right about then.

Our little guerilla operation has put out quite an impressive piece of journalism. Of course, I had to rewrite much of it, but the reporters are learning. The paper is 32 pages, and we have far more original stories than our competitors. And best of all, they make sense. We broke news, which a monthly with a reporting staff of three shouldn’t do, and the photography is actually pretty good, if I do say so myself.

We’re going to have work on respecting deadlines so that we’re not staying until 2:30 in the morning on the day before the paper goes to press, and then come in for another ten-and-a-half the next day just to finish it, though.

Last time I wrote we had one reporter, Helen, who is doing a bang-up job now that she knows what we’re after. She’s pitching stories and we’re letting her do them, and her writing’s gotten better in the nearly one month we’ve been working together.

We hired two more. The first was Teta, an 18-year-old who has never done this before. She’s the niece of my friend Steve, the English guy who put me in touch with Shyaka. Steve said Teta was just sitting around, doing nothing in the year before university. Did we have need for a runner? Well, we don’t have the people-power for a gofer, so she’s now our health and culture reporter. And she, too, is learning. She’s even taking the Associated Press Style Book home with her tonight to read. I’ve got Helen reading “The Elements of Style.” I’m particularly proud of that. When we get into our own office space, I’m getting a white board and am teaching classes. “Okay, people, who can tell me about the inverted pyramid?”

The third reporter is a guy named Magnus, who has got “it” as far as I’m concerned. He just needs to work on the writing. But he knows what news is and he wants to find it. At first he thought he could write for us and The New Times. Not at this paper. We’re competitors and we’re trying to beat them.

My biggest problem with Magnus is that I want to call him Ultra. But that would mean explaining The Transformers, and the movie, and how Ultra Magnus didn’t want the Matrix of Leadership and then Megatron (or at least the version using the voice of Leonard Nimoy) blows him up when he couldn’t open it and he’s rebuilt on the junk planet and then I look like a big nerd, and we just don’t need that. So I’ll just call him Magnus Arvedsson, former winger for the Ottawa Senators hockey club. That’s not nerdy at all.

So anyway, it’s done. The first issue is done. And I’m sleepy. And now we get to do the whole thing again. I’m really proud of the work we’ve done, and the contribution we’re going to make to Rwanda. Maybe that’s a bit much. In reality, I just want to beat the living daylights out of the other papers. We were discussing possible slogans for the paper (you know, like “All the News That’s Fit to Print”) the other day. I could only come up with two, and they were stolen from movies. The first was from Conan the Barbarian: “Crush your enemies. See them driven before you. Hear the lamentation of their women.” The other was from Dodgeball: “We’re better than you, and we know it.” That’s directed at The New Times and Newsline, the other English papers in town, not the readers. Neither suggestion was accepted. Shyaka said he didn’t want a “newspaper war.” Well, I had an answer to that also, from Rambo: “To win a war, you have to become war.” That didn’t go over well either.

February is going to be busy. I’m going to be contributing at least two stories to the paper this month: the kids’ rights story I’m keeping quiet until it happens and my trip to Uganda. Plus I’ve got assignments for the Dallas Morning News and CNS.

I’ll try to write more frequently, but I think I may have to scale back to once a week or so. But that means more personal e-mails. I’ll post more this week, however, as I’m getting the Uganda trip together. But just to make everyone more at ease, I’m debating whether I should break the law when I go there.