By Erin Henk

August 2004

After spending three months in U.S. newsrooms, Diana Zulu of the Zambian Daily Mail in Lusaka, Zambia, and Gbemisola Olujobi of The Guardian in Lagos, Nigeria, will return to their home newspapers with new perspectives and fresh ideas. Zulu and Olujobi are the first recipients of the IWMF’s fellowship program for international women journalists. Olujobi reported on international and African issues at the San Francisco Chronicle and Zulu focused on health issues at The Boston Herald.

Olujobi originally planned to report on women’s issues, but after getting settled at the Chronicle, she decided that her real niche was writing stories about the African community in the U.S. "When the opportunity came to do stories with an international or African slant, I saw that I was going to make an impact in that area because I think I have a perspective that is different than what most people in this country have,” she said. Olujobi’s first published article in the U.S. was about a San Francisco art exhibition on the Nigerian musician Fela Anikulapo-Kuti entitled Far From Home, a Nigerian Journalist Finds Fela's Legacy Alive and Well in Art. It won an award for the Best Story Reflecting the Bay Area Demographics from the San Francisco Chronicle. Olujobi published a total of four articles during her time at the Chronicle, and she has others in the pipeline to be published. She will be contributing to San Francisco publications when she returns to Nigeria.

Zulu, who edits the sports pages for the Zambian Daily Mail, spent her time working at The Boston Herald with an eye to setting up a health page at her home newspaper. “I have enough equipment and material to establish a health desk,” said Zulu. She says that the knowledge she gained at The Herald will give her leverage to convince her bosses to add a health page. She adds that her experience reporting for The Herald has given her the skills she will need to get her idea off the ground.

Olujobi and Zulu are two of a select few women journalists in higher management in the African media. In their countries, they say, women journalists are rarely given assignments that don’t involve homemaking or cooking, and many women reporters give up their jobs because the societal constraints of marriage and family are too great. “There aren’t enough women sticking it out until they get to the top,” said Olujobi. “They become frustrated…and just leave.”

Both Zulu and Olujobi were impressed with the high numbers of women journalists in the newsrooms in which they worked in the U.S. However, Olujobi, who is one of the two women editors at The Guardian, noticed a gender disparity in upper management positions at the San Francisco Chronicle. “The very first editorial meeting I attended, I was in shock because in Nigeria we say it is not like this in America. There is equal representation,” she said. “…but at the editorial meeting I counted 15 men and two women.” Zulu, who is also one of the few women editors at the Zambian Daily Mail, says she noticed that many women at The Herald hold management positions.

Both Olujobi and Zulu were impressed with the communication methods, adequate resources and advanced computer software of their newsrooms.

“It [the computer] brought out very inventive ways of doing stories. … We do everything manually,” Zulu remarked, referring to her newsroom at the Zambian Daily Mail. “The only time we use a computer is when we are logging in a story.”

Zulu was also impressed with e-mail as a way to keep communication going in a newsroom. At the Daily Mail, all communication is verbal and all research is done in the library, as opposed to logging on to the Internet. She wants to persuade her newspaper to include computer upgrades into their next budget cycle and she would also like to see the Daily Mail’s library computerized.

Olujobi described the newsroom at the Chronicle as “more conducive to creativity” than in Nigeria, where the work process is more tedious due to shortage of supplies, frequent power outages and shared resources. “I found it a more relaxed newsroom just by the fact that the job was being done effectively,” she said.

Before being awarded with the IWMF fellowship, Olujobi considered a career change. After 20 years in journalism, she had begun to feel overworked and unfulfilled and, even after being promoted from assistant editor to editor of the Living Section, told herself that she would turn in her resignation at The Guardian when she returned to Nigeria. However, the positive feedback she has received at the San Francisco Chronicle has re-ignited her drive to continue working in journalism. “The appreciation my work received in these past three months is much more than I’ve received all these years. …I just want to be a journalist for the rest of my productive life,” she said. “I would have thrown something precious away if I didn’t get this fellowship.”

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