Where the press conference reigns supreme

After six weeks in Salone, it's clear that my mandate of media capacity building addresses one of the country's pressing needs, and to comprehensively detail all the areas where progress is required will take me more than a single post. But for today, I want to talk a little about a press conference I attended with my colleague Sheik last week, which I feel will effectively illuminate at least a few of the existing issues.

Press release journalism reigns supreme in Sierra Leone - journalists attend and Ministers and other important people give prepared statements, hand-feeding them a story that will, in all likelihood, be very uninteresting, at least without some additional research and digging. Research and digging that generally doesn't occur.

The world over, press release journalism is the purview of lazy journalists. But here, laziness isn't the primary reason why it's so popular. Poverty is.

You see, journalists are paid miserably in Sierra Leone. My colleagues make about Le100,000 per month, or approximately $35. Media houses generally don't reimburse their journalists for work-related costs, such as transportation to cover stories or making phone calls to set up interviews (with pretty much no functioning land lines in the country, everyone has a cell and you pay by the call).

In essence, the more money you spend, the less you'll take home at the end of the month. It's no wonder, then, that investigative journalism has yet to gain traction; even in Canada, it is difficult for media houses to pursue it as often as they'd like because it takes considerable time and resources to unearth the most important stories.

Enter the press conference. Journalists are eager to attend these ubiquitous and - in my estimation, at least - largely uninteresting conferences because the organizations that run them give reporters what their employers won't: money.

At the beginning of each conference, each journalist signs an attendance sheet that, at the end, will ensure they are reimbursed for "transportation" costs. After last week's conference, which I actually wanted to attend, as it was in recognition of World Day for the Prevention of Child Abuse, I learned that the sum of this particular reimbursement was Le15,000 (almost 1/6 of their monthly salary) - even though not one journalist present spent more than Le2000 to get there, and most dished out less than half that. Many of these events throw in a drink or even a lunch as an added bonus to encourage attendance, and those that don't tend to receive fewer attendees.

On top of all that, editors sometimes receive kickbacks when an article about a given event is run in their paper, as if the integrity of the press needed further undermining.

Bryna, my colleague and roommate, was witness to a newsroom more or less on a work strike earlier this month when the editor cut all the legitimate stories in a given day's paper in favour of these press conference pieces and those shamelessly ripped from the Internet. And that's a newsroom that has had three consecutive terms of JHR volunteers espousing the inherent value of real journalism!

Naturally, I want to see journalists receiving a living wage to pursue a profession that is by no means easy. But that wage must be paid by their employer rather than those they're reporting on before the media here can ever hope to operate with the type of integrity required to fulfill the watchdog role. I would argue this is probably the greatest systemic impediment to more effective media in Sierra Leone.

JHR, for its part, has sought to give six journalists the financial support to allow them to pursue investigative pieces by establishing a Media Fellowship that grants each recipient Le2.175 million over a period of three months, a gargantuan salary increase that makes passing up press conferences a much easier act.

I think it's a great initiative that will yield some tremendous stories, but it is nonetheless a temporary solution. Hopefully, these quality pieces will inspire some of the more forward-thinking media barons to open their coffers a little more, but further efforts will no doubt be needed.

One thing I plan to teach my journalists is how to freelance to international media and maybe even land a job as a stringer for a wire service like Reuters or Associated Press, which would supplement their income enough to make them self-sufficient.

Beyond that, I'm just hoping other individuals and organizations can help contribute to working models that will eradicate the current system of thinly-veiled bribery that blurs the line between advertisements and content to a worrying degree.

But this post was supposed to be about the event for the World Day for the Prevention of Child Abuse, right? Well, for the most part, that event was as uninspiring as most of the conferences - it started 75 minutes late, was marred by widespread technical difficulties, and featured prominently the verbose addresses of many a self-important expert.

There was one part that I liked, though. The event featured an awards ceremony for local school children that had excelled in a recent creative contest aimed at highlighting issues of child rights.

Around the room, poems and essays written by the young students hung on the walls. These were inspiring.

I was particularly struck by a pair of essays written by young female students, both bearing variations on the title, "Why My Teacher Should Not Be My Husband". The essays addressed the issue of sexual exploitation of students by their teachers, which aligned directly with the national theme for the day here in SL.

For me, these essays' power lied not so much in their arguments - that if their teacher was their "husband", "lover" or any other number of euphemisms for that perverted fuck that preys on little girls, it would be a distraction from their learning, or they might wonder if they'd actually earned the high grades they received. These are no doubt valid points.

But for me the power in the essays was the simple fact of their existence. That a situation exists wherein young children need to attempt to convince their society that their sexual exploitation at school does not best serve their interests is tragic yet telling.

Thus, when it came to writing the story, this seemed an obvious angle to take, at least in my mind - a sure sign that I didn't come to my understanding of how to report by emulating the press in Sierra Leone.

Here, the formula is simple when writing a lead for a story like this. "This event happened. It happened here at this time. These people spoke." Fabricate a few quotes that vaguely resemble a point the speakers made and you're off to the races. No time for research or statistics, and certainly no need to take a unique angle.

Which is not to say I don't empathize with the reasons that journalism is thusly practiced. Most people don't own computers and even those that do have at best a very cursory understanding of how to use the Internet for effective research.

Nor do I mean to imply that the journalists here aren't smart, capable, passionate people. They are and I respect them a lot. They've just never received sufficient training and they have the misfortune of working within the above outlined media landscape. Which can make the process of sitting down to write a story turn into an exercise in patience, knowing that I could write it on my own exponentially faster (though that's clearly not the point).

Still, in the end, I was relatively happy with how it turned out. When I explained how we could differentiate our story from all the others by employing a more focused lead, he liked the idea, and at the very least I know that the quotes were accurate and important numbers were included.

And the newspaper at Kalleone ran it without the editor indiscriminately chopping it in half, or randomly altering quotes for an event he wasn't at - which often happens at a lot of the papers, believe it or not.

You can read the final story on the JHR website here.

So, to sum up, we have a media landscape plagued by wildly insufficient financial renumeration of a largely untrained reporting corps that is often swayed by monetary incentives offered by the very organizations on which they report.

Oh, and that's just the beginning, my friends. Stay tuned.