Clueless in Cambodia
Door: Frank
Blijf op de hoogte en volg Rosalie
31 Augustus 2006 | Cambodja, Phnom-Penh
Onlangs kwam ik op 't kantoor van de Post een boekje tegen van James Eckardt: “The Year of Living Stupidly”. Tussen 1997 en 1999 was James reporter voor de Post. In het hoofdstukje hieronder beschrijft hij zijn ontmoeting met Michael Hayes (de uitgever) en de dagelijkse gang van zaken op het kantoor. In de tussentijd is er niet veel veranderd...
When I first met publisher Michael Hayes at Phnom Penh's Renaksi Hotel in April 1992, the newspaper was still a gleam in his eye. I'd asked him for a job and he replied that his was just a mom-and-pop operation. Mom was his wife Kathleen. They later separated but Kathleen soldiered on as the paper's managing director. I'd see Michael and Kathleen from time to time in Bangkok. Michael was always good fun, and my fondest memory of Kathleen –half Italian, half-Irish, dark-skinned, green-eyed, resembling a thirty-year-old Joan Baez– was a night at the old Front Page bar where we danced a twirl-and-spin rock n' roll boogie that made Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers look club-footed.
The Phnom Penh Post had a staff of sixteen now. The core reporters were a trio of Kiwis –Matt Grainger, Jason Barber, and Peter Sainsbury– crackerjack journalists all, who'd worked on the same Wellington newspaper. Bou Saroen and Chea Sotheacheath were the Cambodian stars. Chris Fontaine had been a young American intern, working for free when I first looked in on the Post office in 1996. He was deputy managing editor now.
The paper hadn't changed much in six years, except it had gone full color, a twenty-page bi-weekly broadsheet. Crammed with hard news, the Post was the paper of record for Cambodia, sold in kiosks throughout Phnom Penh and distributed worldwide to diplomats and academics. Michael's column, "The Gecko", was the only source of humor, except for the six-month period when Harley Scroobins had been a reporter, but he'd been laid off. Another popular column was "Police Blotter", a fortnightly roundup of murder and mayhem. The front page would be a dramatic photograph accompanied by a lead story and news analysis, the paper's strong point. The weak point was pages of turgid academic prose contributed by overseas "experts" on Cambodia. The weakest point of all was advertising: the paper was skint.
So Michael told me when he arrived in Bangkok, midway between my interview with Ranarriddh and my trip to Huay Chang camp. His way out of the hole, he thought, was to apply for grants from various public and private agencies in the West. As a former Asia Foundation official, he was a whiz at writing grant proposals. He was depending on this money to hire me and others when the paper went weekly to cover the election. Meanwhile, I was on a freelance basis, at ten cents a word. (...)
On March 10th, I finally flew to Phnom Penh.
The newsroom of the Phnom Penh Post –10A, Street 264, next to Wat Botam, just down from the park that was ringed by the National Assembly, the Grand Palace, and the CPP Bodyguard Complex– was the usual shambles. Under ceiling fans, mismatched computers were perched on wooden tables and surrounded by mismatched chairs occupied by hunched-over reporters with cigarettes in their mouths. Adorning the walls were yellowing newspaper headlines, curled up photos, and wise-ass captions and comments. Three young staff members were oo-ing and ah-ing over a photograph of a disinterred corpse –yet another political disappearance.
Upstairs were Michael's living quarters; downstairs the admin and advertising offices and a kitchen where Sopia the cook served up a hearty communal free lunch. Michael wasn't in, so, after lunch, I shifted my bags to the riverside Bert's Books where I had stayed two years earlier. Bert, I knew, was gone because a couple days after the July 5 coup, he'd turned up at my room in the Peachy Flophouse with his Cambodian wife and son and niece, sweaty and wild-eyed and raving about the fascist dictatorship that had devoured Cambodia. He was back in Alaska now and his bookstore/backpacker flophouse, I now discovered, had gone upscale, reverting to what it had been before: a brothel. I opted for the five-dollar all-night room.
Back at the Post, I found Michael. When I told him I was at the brothel, he said, "Hell, Jim, stay with me."
So now I had free room and board, and satellite TV, which Michael and I tuned to the TNT channel every night to watch old movies. I just had to wait till he could pay me a salary.
Three nights after I'd arrived, the paper went into its bi-weekly hyperdrive mode, the deadline crunch. Managing editor Matt Grainger orchestrated the all-night madness, assisted by co-pilot Chris Fontaine. As late breaking stories were coming in, others were being tossed out, others being cut in half and slapped onto spill-over pages. I've never seen anyone revel so much in stress as Matt Grainger, the PageMaker wizard in his backwards baseball cap, chain-smoking Marlboro Lights, grinning, goofing around, whooping, shouting.... He didn't so much bark orders as giggle them.
At the big center table, the rest of us would be correcting proofs. It was here that I observed the schism in the staff. There were the three Kiwis and Chris, and then there were the Human Rights Kids, very rich, he from California, she from Vancouver, who had dropped into Cambodia on a Noble Cause before moving on to law school or international studies. With the wisdom of youth, they knew everything about Cambodia: Hun Sen was a Nazi war criminal and Sam Rainsy was Mother Teresa. The girl roomed with Rich Garella, Sam Rainsy's PR flack, and added a feminist fillip to her human rights reporting. The guy spoke French, wrote reams of sloppy copy, and acted so supercilious that he drove the Kiwis up the wall.
Michael and Kathleen pitched in on the final editing too. They'd order in a big supper as we plowed on through the night. Dawn would be breaking before the last page was put to bed. We'd sleep the next day and party on through the next night, except for the Human Rights Kids who didn't drink or smoke. The morning after that, the paper would be out on the streets.
When I first met publisher Michael Hayes at Phnom Penh's Renaksi Hotel in April 1992, the newspaper was still a gleam in his eye. I'd asked him for a job and he replied that his was just a mom-and-pop operation. Mom was his wife Kathleen. They later separated but Kathleen soldiered on as the paper's managing director. I'd see Michael and Kathleen from time to time in Bangkok. Michael was always good fun, and my fondest memory of Kathleen –half Italian, half-Irish, dark-skinned, green-eyed, resembling a thirty-year-old Joan Baez– was a night at the old Front Page bar where we danced a twirl-and-spin rock n' roll boogie that made Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers look club-footed.
The Phnom Penh Post had a staff of sixteen now. The core reporters were a trio of Kiwis –Matt Grainger, Jason Barber, and Peter Sainsbury– crackerjack journalists all, who'd worked on the same Wellington newspaper. Bou Saroen and Chea Sotheacheath were the Cambodian stars. Chris Fontaine had been a young American intern, working for free when I first looked in on the Post office in 1996. He was deputy managing editor now.
The paper hadn't changed much in six years, except it had gone full color, a twenty-page bi-weekly broadsheet. Crammed with hard news, the Post was the paper of record for Cambodia, sold in kiosks throughout Phnom Penh and distributed worldwide to diplomats and academics. Michael's column, "The Gecko", was the only source of humor, except for the six-month period when Harley Scroobins had been a reporter, but he'd been laid off. Another popular column was "Police Blotter", a fortnightly roundup of murder and mayhem. The front page would be a dramatic photograph accompanied by a lead story and news analysis, the paper's strong point. The weak point was pages of turgid academic prose contributed by overseas "experts" on Cambodia. The weakest point of all was advertising: the paper was skint.
So Michael told me when he arrived in Bangkok, midway between my interview with Ranarriddh and my trip to Huay Chang camp. His way out of the hole, he thought, was to apply for grants from various public and private agencies in the West. As a former Asia Foundation official, he was a whiz at writing grant proposals. He was depending on this money to hire me and others when the paper went weekly to cover the election. Meanwhile, I was on a freelance basis, at ten cents a word. (...)
On March 10th, I finally flew to Phnom Penh.
The newsroom of the Phnom Penh Post –10A, Street 264, next to Wat Botam, just down from the park that was ringed by the National Assembly, the Grand Palace, and the CPP Bodyguard Complex– was the usual shambles. Under ceiling fans, mismatched computers were perched on wooden tables and surrounded by mismatched chairs occupied by hunched-over reporters with cigarettes in their mouths. Adorning the walls were yellowing newspaper headlines, curled up photos, and wise-ass captions and comments. Three young staff members were oo-ing and ah-ing over a photograph of a disinterred corpse –yet another political disappearance.
Upstairs were Michael's living quarters; downstairs the admin and advertising offices and a kitchen where Sopia the cook served up a hearty communal free lunch. Michael wasn't in, so, after lunch, I shifted my bags to the riverside Bert's Books where I had stayed two years earlier. Bert, I knew, was gone because a couple days after the July 5 coup, he'd turned up at my room in the Peachy Flophouse with his Cambodian wife and son and niece, sweaty and wild-eyed and raving about the fascist dictatorship that had devoured Cambodia. He was back in Alaska now and his bookstore/backpacker flophouse, I now discovered, had gone upscale, reverting to what it had been before: a brothel. I opted for the five-dollar all-night room.
Back at the Post, I found Michael. When I told him I was at the brothel, he said, "Hell, Jim, stay with me."
So now I had free room and board, and satellite TV, which Michael and I tuned to the TNT channel every night to watch old movies. I just had to wait till he could pay me a salary.
Three nights after I'd arrived, the paper went into its bi-weekly hyperdrive mode, the deadline crunch. Managing editor Matt Grainger orchestrated the all-night madness, assisted by co-pilot Chris Fontaine. As late breaking stories were coming in, others were being tossed out, others being cut in half and slapped onto spill-over pages. I've never seen anyone revel so much in stress as Matt Grainger, the PageMaker wizard in his backwards baseball cap, chain-smoking Marlboro Lights, grinning, goofing around, whooping, shouting.... He didn't so much bark orders as giggle them.
At the big center table, the rest of us would be correcting proofs. It was here that I observed the schism in the staff. There were the three Kiwis and Chris, and then there were the Human Rights Kids, very rich, he from California, she from Vancouver, who had dropped into Cambodia on a Noble Cause before moving on to law school or international studies. With the wisdom of youth, they knew everything about Cambodia: Hun Sen was a Nazi war criminal and Sam Rainsy was Mother Teresa. The girl roomed with Rich Garella, Sam Rainsy's PR flack, and added a feminist fillip to her human rights reporting. The guy spoke French, wrote reams of sloppy copy, and acted so supercilious that he drove the Kiwis up the wall.
Michael and Kathleen pitched in on the final editing too. They'd order in a big supper as we plowed on through the night. Dawn would be breaking before the last page was put to bed. We'd sleep the next day and party on through the next night, except for the Human Rights Kids who didn't drink or smoke. The morning after that, the paper would be out on the streets.
Reageer op dit reisverslag
Je kunt nu ook Smileys gebruiken. Via de toolbar, toetsenbord of door eerst : te typen en dan een woord bijvoorbeeld :smiley
