A professor once told me: "Someday you'll cover an event at The Drake. You're gonna wanna drink the champagne. Do NOT drink the champagne."
Journalists in the States do their best to remain impartial, at the very least, on the surface. So at press conferences and events, we try not to indulge in gifts, like food, from our sources.
In Kenya, I'm pretty excited when I cover a press conference, because I know it means I get to eat lunch that day.
Many press conferences, or pressers, here come complete with buffets. If you don't eat, everyone thinks you're rude, or perhaps even crazy. And that's not the only way they differ from the States.
Today I attended a press event for an upcoming "bootcamp challenge" at Paradise Lost, a gorgeous national park on Kiambu Road. At noon, my colleague and I were picked up in a van containing the rest of Nairobi's sports media, and carted off to the presser. When we got there, Tony, my colleague, said he didn't like the way the sun was hitting the speakers' table, so he moved it to a completely different spot. No problem.
Then the press conference began, and the bootcamp challenge sponsors decided to show us an example of what some of the weekend's events would be like. To do so, they asked the press corps to try them out, and the camera men for every reporter shot and aired said displays.
Talk about becoming part of the story. When Tony and I went back to the newsroom to write our scripts (mine in English, his in Swahili) his came complete with self-taken shot of himself in a rowboat. When we were editing he tried like hell to put a shot of me taking notes (no I did not participate in the demonstrations!) into my story and I screamed until he took it out.
You see, last quarter a band of renegade pirate impersonators covered me in buccaneer garb during a shoot, and I got a stern warning that I had better not use those shots. In my defense, those pirates attacked me, and I never would have used a shot of me holding a sword, but I definitely saw where my professor was coming from.
You can't be part of the story, no matter how silly it is. I may have to bend on a few of my journalistic principles here (I mean, a girl's gotta eat), but that one is sticking with me.
