Last week I interviewed Jennie Matthew. She’s the Khartoum correspondent and stringer for Agence France Presse. In that function she covers current events in central Africa, liaising with the head office in Paris and other stringers scattered throughout the area. I spoke to her because she had been one of the first people to gather on the ground information about a bizarre incident that had taken place on the border between Chad and Sudan. Two French soldiers serving with the EUFOR peace keeping mission in Chad had gotten lost along the border and had accidentally strayed into Sudanese territory. Without realising it they had come very close to a group of Sudanese soldiers. There had been a fire fight during which one of the French soldiers was badly insured. The other one managed to escape and get back over the border.
The Khartoum office of AFP is pretty cramped. To be honest it’s not so much an office as Matthew’s apartment. While we were speaking about the incident and it’s aftermath I also asked her how working in Khartoum compared to working in a western newsroom. One of the first things Mathews said was that she was severely constrained through her lack of a DSL line. While this was supposed to be taken care of soon it meant that she had to rely on a modem to hook into the agency’s servers.
Matthew has worked in occupied Jerusalem, Gaza and Iraq, a remarkable achievement for someone who has only been in the industry for some four years. She linked Khartoum. It seemed that she had come to embrace the slower news cycle of her new home. Matthew is working on a one year contract. The differences she described seemed to stem as much from cultural as they did from technological differences: ”It can take a lot of travelling in the hot weather and waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting and lots of cups of tea before you get where you need to be and meet the right kind of people.”
As a stringer Matthew relies on locals to provide her with news stories and background information. But to get this information she has to go out and meet them. It might be enough to call people that you know but for every new story you also have to go out there and do the ‘grunt work’.
It seemed that while her ability to communicate with other parts of the world had been enhanced greatly by digital technology, the quality of her journalism still depended on her walking the walk and talking the talk.
These are some of Matthew’s articles on the issue:
French peacekeeper missing amid Sudan-Chad clashes
EG
