The full circle journalism has come

My first day in a newspaper office came when I was in high school.

The Nation newspaper had organised a school competition on the best written essay and best designed school magazine.

At the end of it, the winners and the runners-up were invited to visit the newspaper offices, then at old Nation House on Tom Mboya Street.

In those days journalism was more of passion than a career choice.

The boy who won the prize for the best written article is today a medical doctor.

CAREER

On my part I was taking science subjects in then “A”-level with engineering as my choice of career.

My father worked in the construction industry and had impressed on me that engineering was the best profession in the world.

So I took science subjects much as I didn’t like the smell in the physics and chemistry labs. Anyway, I never became an engineer.

Later I would learn that another boy by the name Japheth Koome who was a class ahead of me in a different school too had been prevailed upon to pursue engineering.

He graduated as a civil engineer from the University of Nairobi but immediately sought a career where his heart was, in the Kenya Police Service.

Today Mr Koome is the Principal Assistant to the deputy Inspector-General of Police and touted as the most likely next Inspector-General of Kenya Police.

KEN WALIBORA

A few classes ahead of me was another boy named David Oginde who went on to graduate with a degree in architecture but never practised it.

Today, Dr Oginde is my bishop at the CITAM ministries. Lately he also joined my racket and is a columnist with the Sunday Standard.

You can read him today but first you start with my column.

The boy who edited our school magazine before me was one Ken Walibora who at first strayed to work as a Probation Officer before he rediscovered himself as a journalist.

Today Prof Walibora is a highly acclaimed Kiswahili broadcaster and author.

My favourite of his books is titled Kidagaa Kimemuozea. Translate that if you can.

CALESTOUS JUMA

Not to mind, those of us doing sciences had the inspiration to be journalists because two of the country’s toughest journalists when we were growing up were scientists by training.

One was Mr Hilary Ng’weno, a Harvard-trained nuclear physicist who on return to Kenya had landed a job as the first African Editor-in-Chief of the Nation.

Later he founded the Weekly Review, which for many years was the equivalent of Time or Newsweek in this part of the world.

Another big name in the media those days, and who, like Ngw’eno, never saw the inside of a journalism class, was Calestous Juma, yes, the professor.

He’d begun as a primary school science teacher to become the first science and environment writer for the Nation.

DIVERSITY

Later, he returned to the academia to become a globally acclaimed authority in science and scholarship.

Perhaps Dr Fred Matiang’i (Oops, now it is Madam Amina Mohamed) should have come much earlier to give us the new skills-based education curriculum to avoid the mismatch in what people studied in school and the careers they pursued in the fullness of time.

Sorry for the digression. We were on my first day in a newspaper office.

At the old Nation House, we were welcomed by then newspaper Training Editor Bob Hitchcock, and the Executive Editor Sean Egan.

In those days you could find Mzungus working in the local newspapers.

Today if you find one in a local media house, then he/she is a diplomat attending a talk-show or a tourist who has missed direction to the animal orphanage.

TOM MSHINDI

The Nation office those days was a clumsy place with little oxygen to go around.

The staircase to the office on the first floor of the building threatened to collapse even at our paper weight as school boys

We were first taken to the office of the Managing Editor, George Mbugguss.

Just at the entrance to his office sat a skinny young man with a small goatee for a beard. He was introduced to us as Tom, the newspaper researcher and leader writer.

Today he is Mr Mshindi, the big editorial man at the Nation Media Group.

NEWSROOM

Mr Mbugguss cut a fatherly figure and sucked his cigarette like it was a life-support machine.

He warmly welcomed us and told us he looked forward to us coming back to work for the newspaper.

He could as well have been talking to me but I wasn’t interested at the time.

The newsroom of the day was very much like a mad house, or a market downtown Lagos in Nigeria.

Everybody was shouting at the other. Unlike today when Nation offices are a non-smoking zone, in those days almost everyone had a stick and an ashtray on the table.

DRESS CODE

You could easily conclude cigarettes were a medical prescription for journalists.

Others smelled of methane, an indication the previous evening they had been to places where liquids other than tea were served.

The dress code was very liberal, unlike today when a necktie and jacket is the policy.

I remember noting a journalist or two who looked like they had slept in their trousers if not that they had a soda bottle for a wardrobe.

To explain to us the newspaper production process was the News Editor, one Peter Kareithi. He was dressed in jeans and short sleeves.

We found him reading a novel, his legs resting on the desk. “Ok boys what do you want to know from me?”

STORY HUNTING

He asked in a manner to suggest we’re wasting his precious time.

Most of his reporters, he told us, were out on various news gathering assignments.

Later in the day they would come back to “bang” — that is the word he used — the stories on the manual typewriters, half of which looked broken.

Other stories would be coming (he used the word filed) from the field by correspondents in various parts of the country.

The foreign news would come via a creaky telex machine next to his desk, and which sounded much like a power saw.

The reporters typed out the stories in four copies using carbon paper.

EDITING

The first copy went to the Chief Sub-Editor, another to the Managing Editor while the News Editor and the reporter were left with one each.

The Chief Sub-Editor would distribute the stories received among his sub-editors who would manually edit the stories with a red biro.

The edited stories were then given to type-setters for manual re-typing.

From there they were passed on to the paste-up artist who literally pasted them on the newspaper page using paste-glue.

He would be guided by a hand-drawn lay-out sheet provided by the editor.

The layout sheet also had markings from the advertising manager on size and position of the adverts expected for the day.

PRINTING

The pasted page would then be filmed at what was called the darkroom, and it was really dark inside there.

The filmed pages called bromides would then be made into plates for web printing.

Unlike today when a printer can take up the whole newspaper at a go, at the time only four pages could be printed in a single run.

The sheets of four pages would then be manually put together and arranged in a newspaper form.

In case some pages came out larger than usual, they would be trimmed using a manual paper-cutter.

But somehow, and with all the manual work, the newspaper would still be out in the streets by five in the morning.

But of course, you would have to physically walk to the streets to get your copy unlike today when you can read it online from the comfort of your bed.

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