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Author: Mike Awoyinfa
Posted to the web: 7/27/2005 8:55:25 PM

In these days of rampant terrorist attacks, one needs to take a refresher course on how to report terrorism, how to report the big, global story. Don’t ask me what makes a big, global story. I cannot define it, but I know it, if I see it. It is the kind of story that predictably would hit the cover of the next TIME magazine or Newsweek. It is the kind of story that the tabloids would definitely display effusively in big, dramatic, powerful pictures that tell the story—even without words. It is the kind of story that hits your face with a bang, with just one screaming horror headline. When kamikaze pilots fly their hijacked planes into New York’s Twin Towers, bringing down death and destruction of apocalyptic proportions, you know instantly you have in your hands a big global story. When you have underground trains and buses being blown apart, killing scores of people such as it happened on July 7, 2005, on that bloody rush hour Thursday morning in London, you know instantly that this is one tragedy that would reverberate around the world and make the front page of every newspaper that calls itself a newspaper. Terror has become big news, big business, big nightmare, big treatment, big reportage, big photographs, big impact, big problem, big concern to everyone all over the world.As you watch the news break on Cable TV that fateful morning, the adrenalin begins to flow. You want to be part of the story. The reporter in you begins to take over. Like a firefighter, you feel a call to duty. Your mind starts processing the whole scenario. And you start reacting. You start thinking of what to do. How to race to the scene and get into the groove as quickly as possible. How to be part of the chaos. How to risk your life to cover the big news. How to be part of journalistic history. News is history. Today’s news, as they say, is tomorrow’s history. A reporter is a historian. A reporter is many things rolled into one. He or she is like a firefighter. Like a policeman. Like a detective. A reporter is like kamikaze pilot. A reporter is like a lunatic. No, he is even a lunatic. In the words of H.R. Knickerbocker, “Whenever you find hundreds and thousands of sane people trying to get out of a place and little bunch of madmen trying to get in, you know the latter are reporters.” Yes, you need some sort of madness to survive as a reporter. You need a “madness with a method” as Shakespeare would put it in Hamlet. You probably get the first wind of the news through the wire service or the radio or the television. It comes in form of a newsflash, like a trivia. But as the seconds tick, it snowballs into an event of greater proportion with death figures changing by the minute. If you are at home when the news is breaking and your editor had not linked up with you, you are already linking up with your editor to agree on a strategy for covering the story. In such a big story, any good newspaper would devote a lot of resources to it, a lot of manpower, an army of reporters to cover it. For its edition of July 8, 2005 headlined, ‘SUICIDE BOMBER’ on the No. 30, The Sun in London, sent out an army of 33 reporters and 9 photographers to cover the big tragedy. As if to match The Sun man for man, the Daily Mail also sent out a reporting team of 33 reporters! The bigger the story, the bigger the manpower invested into it. Armed with a notebook, a reporter would race to the scene of the accident, looking around, observing the wounded whose faces are caked in dirt and debris, asking them questions about what happened, interviewing eyewitnesses, counting the dead and the wounded, talking to Good Samaritans, talking to the police, talking to the rescue agencies, scribbling furiously in his notebook the things he is observing, the things he is hearing. It is important to write things down because you can forget certain key details. You can’t depend solely on your recollections, though the mind has an amazing capacity to recall. You won’t be the only reporter out there. You would be competing with reporters even from your own organization. So you should aim high at beating your competition, by going out of the ordinary to get exclusives. Some reporters would be on the scene, others would be at the hospital, others would be busy phoning the relatives of the dead and the wounded based on documents and ID cards recovered from them. In some cases the reporter finds himself delivering the bad news, telling say the mother or the father of the dead: “Your daughter is dead.” I have read about one bad classic case of a reporter who first lied to a mother to get a good profile of the dead daughter. “Congrats madam, your daughter has just won a beauty contest,” he told the elated mum, who talked happily about her daughter. After getting the information, the sadistic reporter then nailed her: “Sorry, your daughter just died in an accident. How do you feel?” How do you want her to feel? To tell you, “I am happy”? The mother simply collapsed. Reporters can be that insensitive. But that is the ugly side of the profession. Get the news first. Get it at all costs. But please, be ethical. I would not be party to cruelty in the name of hunting for news. A reporter can do anything to get news. I know of a reporter who helped carry corpses in the bid to get a human angle story. Sam Omatseye in his days at the Weekend Concord tabloid which I once edited, won an award helping to carry the corpse of soldiers killed many years ago when a military plane crashed into a swampy bush in Ejigbo district of Lagos. Reporting big tragedy stories is a team effort. Every reporter would go out there sourcing for his own angle to the big story. Everybody plays his part to score goal. And the goal is to evolve a complete picture of what happened, where it happened, who were involved, how it happened, when it happened, why it happened, and how people are reacting to the tragedy. After every reporter has submitted his or her report, an anchorman, who is the finest writer in the team, would read all the reports and, with a little help from the wire services, write one clear, coherent, readable story—taking bits and pieces from the various reports. In writing the report, the anchorman tries to get a full rounded picture of the story. As a reporter, you are eyes and the ears of the reader. You should tell the full story without leaving any gaps for the reader to ask questions. You should take your reader right there to the spot of the accident and let him see and hear everything as if with a TV camera. Nigeria’s Pulitzer-winning journalist Dele Olojede told me about his approach to reporting: “I see myself as a storyteller. I paint pictures, I describe. I let my readers hear voices of people talking, so that somebody reading the story would feel as if they are there. Good reporting is about the ability to empathize with the people you are writing about without necessarily getting sucked in, without becoming emotional about it.”Today, the challenge of competing against television that beams the big story live into the living room, makes it imperative that you should do something extra, something detailed, something the TV cannot do or would not do. You must offer the reader the news behind the news. As you are writing, questions are agitating your mind. You want to know: How does this tragedy compare with tragedies of its kind in the past in your country or elsewhere? Obviously, reporters in Britain would make allusions to the Second World War bombings, to the Blitz, when Britain was subjected to heavy bombings by Hitler’s army. Reporters in America would obviously allude to the September 11 terrorist attack. You ask yourself: Is this the biggest or the worst terrorism attack in your country or in Europe or even the whole world? How many people are feared dead? How many injured? You should be careful in reporting death figures. Usually newspapers give conflicting figures. You can’t always get a uniform figure. But don’t give an outrageous figure based on hearsay. Be sure of your facts so as not to embarrass your paper. The guiding rule: verify and verify before publishing, otherwise you would create another disaster for your paper. If the story is far away, look for a local angle. American tabloids would look for the American angle in a story breaking in England. For Nigerian readers, Marie Fatayi-Williams, the Nigerian mother who travelled to London in search of her missing son was the local face to this global story. Any Nigerian paper that did not carry it on front page should bury its face in shame. It is one human angle story that would touch the heart of mothers everywhere. A traumatized Nigerian mum carrying her son’s picture and crying to the whole world: “This is Anthony, Anthony Fatayi-Williams, 26 years old. He is missing and we fear that he was in the bus explosion that exploded here on Thursday…My son Anthony is my first son—26—my only son, the head of my family. In African society we hold on to sons…How many tears shall we cry? How many mothers’ hearts must be maimed? My heart is maimed at this moment.” No wonder all the British tabloids carried the full speech, which in itself is the story—a human angle story! Here in Nigeria, The Daily Sun also carried the speech in full and we used the face of Mrs. Marie Fatayi-Williams, an oil company marketing director in Nigeria as big as it could. Good tabloids, wherever they are, think alike. Every editor knows the shame and the pain of missing a big story. It is one regret that sticks for life. You become part of newsroom folklore. In Nigeria, there is this folklore of an editor who stayed at home on a day of coup probably for fear of his life. And naturally he lost his job. How you treat a big story gains you respect in the eyes of your peers and your readers. But for a big terrorism story as it happened inside Tubes in London and in open bus, the anchor knows he has to paint the big broad picture for the reader to see. It is also important to build a chronology of what happened, with the story playing in the reader’s head like a video, minute by minute. Is there a pattern to similar tragedy? Are suicide killers involved? What are the police saying? What are they doing? What efforts are being made to track down the killers? What are the forensic experts saying? Was the attack chosen to coincide with an event? Who are the heroes and heroines of the rescue efforts? What is the President or the Prime Minister saying? Where was he when the event happened? How are other world leaders taking this? What are the ordinary people saying? Who is claiming responsibility for this? How are the relatives taking it? What are they saying? Are there any prominent persons dead? If so, rush to the library and do a piece on the prominent persons. Then there is what is called sidebars or side stories—stories that can stand on their own like tributaries of a big river. There are so many sidebar stories to do. The life and times of Mrs. Marie Fatayi-Williams is one sidebar story that would interest Nigerian readers. Reporting is about what would interest your readers. Find what would interest them and give it to them. That is the No.1 rule. Even the business world cannot be ruled out. How would the tragedy affect the Stock Exchange? Journalism is so much fun. Even amidst tragedy, you are having fun reporting and at the same time weeping for the dead.