In August, veteran ex-Reuters correspondent Colin McIntyre flew to Beijing for the Thomson Reuters Foundation to lend a helping hand to a group of journalists from developing countries covering the Olympics, most of them for the first time. It was the second summer Games running that he has been called on to run the International Olympic Committee’s Media Outreach Programme, which gives journalists from some of the smaller countries the opportunity to follow their home and regional athletes in their events.
Participants came from Fiji, Panama, Mongolia, Tajikistan, Iraq, Sudan, Mauritania, Tanzania, Botswana, Gambia, Malawi, Zimbabwe and South Africa. Reflecting some of Africa’s current and past problems, the Zimbabwean was based in London, and the South African representative was a Rwandan who had to flee Rwanda during the genocide in 1994. The two Iraqi journalists were from Voices of Iraq, the web-based independent news agency started in 2004 with the help of the Reuters Foundation.
The Tajik representative, who spoke no English, arrived two days late and immediately disappeared, but surfaced several days later at breakfast and managed to get across the message that he was very happy. McIntyre started with a day of class-room training covering the history of the Olympics, what to look out for, including personalities and possible drug cases, and story angles showing examples from previous Olympics. The participants were also given a brief introduction to writing sports features, with sample intros from Reuters stories from the Sydney and Athens Games. They were shown video clips from some of the great moments in sport, including Bob Beamon’s record long jump in the 1968 Mexico Olympics and Australian aborigine Cathy Freeman’s 400-metre victory in Sydney, and asked to produce intros, which were then discussed and compared with reports by the international press.
The next day the group visited the spectacular “Bird’s Nest” Olympic stadium for the opening day of the track and field competition where most of the group had a home athlete to follow. The group were introduced to the mysteries of the Mixed Zone, where reporters can speak to athletes at the end of their event, though with 22,000 journalists covering the Games – more than the athletes -- these can be chaotic. There was also local interest in boxing, weight-lifting, swimming and wrestling.
After home interest for most of the journalists waned with the elimination of their athletes, the group visited various venues to watch sports that were under-reported back home, such as volleyball, handball and beach volleyball, which many felt deserved to have wider appeal.