OPINIÓN

Journalism in the El Faro era

The author is the Washington Post London correspondent. He and his wife, Mary Jordan, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2003 during his post as Mexico City correspondents, for a story on the Mexican criminal justice system; both are authors of the book “The Prison Angel” about the work in the Tijuana prisons of a Beverly Hills millionaire turned religious.

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     El Faro’s ten years of publication coincides with a period of stunning change in the news business. Books have been written on how newsgathering has changed, but I thought it might be instructive to describe how my life as a foreign correspondent is different now from 1998.

    Back then, my wife (Mary Jordan) and I were the Washington Post’s correspondents in Tokyo, with primary responsibility for Japan and the Koreas, plus a wider mandate to help cover Asia along with our bureaus in Beijing, Hong Kong and Jakarta.

    When I packed for a trip, I carried a laptop, camera and rolls of film, notebooks and a pen. I’d arrive in Seoul or Jakarta or Taipei, report my story, shoot some photos and then head back to my hotel.

    Often I would also have to find the local office of the Associated Press or Reuters, and pay them to develop my film and transmit a photo or two to Washington. Other times, I’d have to find a one-hour developing shop then FedEx my pictures back to DC.

    In my hotel room, I’d type out my story on the laptop, then try to find a decent dial-up connection to send. The hotel would often charge $25 a day for access. Then I’d go out for dinner or a beer, talk by telephone with my desk about the editing. Then a half a day later my story would appear in the paper.

    I’m trying hard to remember now, but I honestly don’t remember in 1998 spending much time looking at my stories on our website. We obviously had a good site even then, but it wasn’t really on my radar screen. Most of the time, as I remember it, I would first see my stories a couple of weeks later, when a FedEx pouch would arrive from Washington with our mail and recent clips.

   The whole process was state of the art at the time, but looking back now it seems no more modern than writing on cave walls.

  Consider my most recent reporting trip, to Guinea-Bissau in West Africa. I made the journey with only carry-on luggage, just one small backpack. In it I carried a laptop not much bigger than a standard notebook—with absolutely no telephone wires, as my connection would be wireless, of course. I carried a digital camera the size of a pack of cigarettes and a digital video camera that is just about as small.

  I checked into my little hotel in Guinea-Bissau, one of the poorest countries in the world, plugged in my laptop and connected to the Internet over the hotel’s high-speed wireless router—all for free.

   Over the next five days I took about 400 digital photos, stored on a single 1-gigabit flashcard, and I took about 100 short video clips with the video camera, which I kept on my belt in a tiny camera case.

   If I needed to, I could have transmitted all of that back to Washington from the shores of West Africa. As it turns out, I wasn’t in a huge hurry so I returned home to London before I transmitted my story, 75 of the best photos and about 60 short video clips.

   But it’s not just that the technology has improved. What I produced for publication was fundamentally different than it would have been in 1998. First there was my long main story, about how Colombian cocaine cartels are shipping huge amounts of drugs to Europe, via West Africa, plus three or four photos that ran in the paper.

   But for the web, I also helped put together a photo gallery of about a dozen additional photos. In the old days, those images would have been left on the darkroom floor, never seen by anyone.

   I also wrote a script and recorded the narration for a 3-minute video presentation that went with the story. Surveys of our web users shows that people really enjoy these short presentations, even if they are not Hollywood quality films.

   In addition to all that, I wrote two more stories that ran in the paper and on the web for a new feature called “Field Notes.” The idea is to give readers more of an idea of how foreign correspondents work, laying out stories about how we get our stories, maybe connecting a bit more deeply with readers.

   It also gives us a way to tell our readers all the little details that are interesting but maybe not important or on-point enough to make it into the main story. The stories are very personal, and told in the first person, which is a new (and slightly uncomfortable) experience for me as a journalist.
   One of my Field Notes stories talked about how weird it is to try to travel to a country that most people have never heard of, and some color about what it’s like to work there. The other was about my visit to the abandoned U.S. embassy in Bissau, which was closed back in June 1998 (at the dawn of the El Faro era), amid a nasty little civil war.

   Ten years ago, my entire production on a trip like that would have been a single story in the paper accompanied by maybe one or two photos. The web would have been an afterthought.

   In May 2008, my trip yielded a main story plus four photos, two first-hand “Field Notes” accounts of the adventure, a gallery of photos on the web and a 4-minute video presentation narrated by me.

   And that’s not to mention answering some of the scores of emails from readers that land in my in-box. Post bylines are now hyperlinks, so readers need only click on my name to send me an email telling me what they think. The Guinea-Bissau story prompted lots of nice comments; readers tend to be harsher when the subject is more sensitive, like immigration or American politics.

    It’s an awful lot more work than it used to be, and it requires lots of new skills. But I have to admit, it’s a lot more rewarding. The Guinea-Bissau story was given hugely prominent play on the Washington Post’s Sunday front page, which, I have to admit, is still a kick even after 28 years in this business.

   But seeing the full package of stories and images on the web is maybe even more rewarding, because I feel like an old dog who’s learned new tricks.

   And it’s all there permanently, easily found on the world section of our website (www.washingtonpost.com). And in addition, in another reflection of the new ways the web is allowing us to showcase our work, it can also be seen on my correspondent’s page (http://projects.washingtonpost.com/staff/articles/kevin+sullivan/), on the Post’s “Worldview” page (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/world/worldview/) and even on my Facebook page, (http://www.facebook.com/pages/Kevin-Sullivan/16086094774).

   It’s most definitely a new day in journalism, and in my world as a foreign correspondent. But, despite the very real problems in our industry, it’s also an exciting time. El Faro is celebrating 10 years, and I am two years away from celebrating 50. As far as I can tell, we’re both still having a lot of fun.

See also from this series:

• Can A Poet Be More Accurate Than A Journalist? - II.- Cuba
  By Andrei Codrescu
• Can A Poet Be More Accurate Than A Journalist?
  Por Andrei Codrescu
• Construir un medio con valores, no modas
  By Patrice Schneider
• El Faro and the Challenges of Journalism
  By Jim Bettinger

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