During the six months that my wife, Karen Freeman, and I have been working as Knight International Journalism Fellows in Moldova, we have been humbled by the dedication of journalists facing daunting problems, frustrated by the slow pace of change and excited by the possibilities for the future. Most days, all three, sometimes all at once.
Our task when we arrived was to work with Moldovan journalists where we could and, especially, work with Corina Cepoi at the Independent Journalism Center to establish the Chisinau School of Advanced Journalism. As veteran journalists and veteran journalism educators, we thought the job would be tough, all right, but were confident we could make serious progress and make it at the pace that suits frenetic New Yorkers.
Thanks in large measure to years of preparatory work already done by Moldovans and their friends and supporters in Europe and the United States, the school opened in early September with 20 students taking on a rigorous curriculum of reporting, writing, editing, photographing and engaging in many other facets of high-quality journalism as it is practiced in the West in the 21st century. The demands on the students are enormous. The intention is to replicate, insofar as possible, an entire two- or two-and-a-half-year Western-style journalism program and do it in 10 months. At this point, deep into the first semester, we can point to substantial successes and notable failures. The successes have come largely through the students’ willingness to work hard at skills and concepts that are frequently alien to them. Three months into the program, it is fair to say that all the students in the program have a better idea than they had 90 days about journalism that meets international standards. The school is still very much a work in progress – and certainly will remain so long after this academic year is over. The failures have been notable as well. These are in part my own failure of imagination – failing to understand how profound the differences between the journalism I’ve lived with for 40 years and the journalism practiced here. There are virtually no models for students to emulate of the aggressive but fair reporting and clean, crisp writing that are the hallmarks of the best of Western journalism.
And I underestimated, I think, the power of the state, the residual mindset of life in the Soviet Union and the absence within the citizenry of the bedrock democratic conviction that government can and must be made to do the bidding of the citizenry. Government exists to serve the people not to try to master them.
Yet within the school and in the too-few successful independent news organizations there are many people of truly extraordinary dedication to trying to learn how to succeed in Western-style journalism here in Moldova. It is humbling to work among them because two things we largely take for granted in the West – the money to publish and the freedom to publish – are too-often lacking in Moldova. Publishing is a public service, to be sure, but it is also a business and must be so if it is to do its job. Even if the government had both the money and the will to provide major subsidies to the press, it would be dangerous, quite probably fatal, to independent journalism to accept it. So publishing requires income that has to come from either subscribers or advertisers. And in an economy as precarious as that of Moldova, the advertising revenue for consumer goods seems inadequate to support a thriving news business.
And while the laws in Moldova concerning journalists and their rights of access to political documents are strong, all too often they are flouted in reality. Taking a lawmaker to court can be done, but the journalists rarely win until the matter gets to the Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. And that, of course, is a lengthy and expensive proposition. It has happened and it continues to happen and doubtless both journalism and the public it serves are better for those suits. But as a practical matter, most journalists with daily and weekly deadlines are not going to take the months out of their careers needed to sue the government over access to documents.
But for all the setbacks, it is positively exhilarating to be part of the metamorphosis of journalism in Moldova. Here are a few concrete suggestions I think journalists here should think about:
Pack journalism. Pack journalism is a derogatory term frequently used in the United States to suggest journalists traveling in packs like wild dogs or hyenas. The image is of reporters, often but not always television reporters with their crews and all their equipment, showing up in droves to encamp on the lawn of someone who happens to be newsworthy at the moment. But pack journalism also means journalists following the lead of other journalists, of following up on and advancing stories that their colleagues at other papers stations and papers break. A little pack journalism could help in Moldova. When a paper or station breaks a good story about, say, corruption or a governmental abuse of power, if the other papers and stations would follow up on that story, it would vastly increase the power of the press to be a force for change. Remember: The chief purpose of journalism is to monitor the doings of government and important private institutions and report on how they are doing to the citizens. It is only with such reporting that the citizens can know whether to reward the governors with further terms in office, to instruct them to change their behavior, or to drive them from office entirely. The shorthand term for this crucial function of journalism is the watchdog. Currently in Moldova, when a paper or station gets a good story, we have one dog barking. It is easy to ignore – or to silence – one dog. It is impossible to ignore a pack of barking dogs.
News you can use: People read newspapers and watch television news for a lot of reasons. They want and need to know about politics, to be sure. Keeping government honest is journalism’s most essential function and it must not be ignored. But readers like other kinds of stories as well and a paper or station interesting in building reader interest will generate tons of them. This does not mean scouring the sewers for celebrity gossip and sensational crime stories. It does mean getting out of the government office blocs and beyond the news conferences of politicians and into the streets where people live. It means getting to know and understand the life of a trolleybus driver as well as that of his passengers. It means spending time in lyceums and in shops and parks, getting to know people and their every day lives and then writing about them. It means covering health, education, safety, child-rearing, economics, travel, technology and all the other things that people want to know about. You do not have to pander or titillate in order to be interesting and informative.
Photographs: Sadly, photojournalism is far less advanced in Moldova than it is in many Western countries. By international standards, there are too few photographs used at all, and far too many of the ones that are used are speech and meeting pictures – one or 10 or 25 people, usually in business attire, standing at a lecture or sitting around a table talking. It is hard to imagine much less interesting visually. Sometimes these are genuine news events, which deserve coverage and maybe even with a camera. But such photos make up a major part of Moldovan photo coverage, way more than is effective. Every paper should have at least one and ideally several full-time, well-trained photographers who are given the space to show off their talents. Photojournalism not only adds a great deal of information to a newspaper. It draws readers like a magnet.
Steven R. Knowlton
Mass media in Moldova
(December, 2006)
