What I do here

Medellin, COLOMBIA -- Work usually starts with Adriaan knocking on my door. Although most nights he's out with one of his parade of girlfriends or playing billiards until late, he always manages to rise before me. I chalk it up to countless cups of tinto--coffee, Colombian style---and cigarettes. So, my boss is also my alarm clock. After the knock--which I usually respond to in Spanish, despite both of us being more comfortable speaking English--I rise, dress and shuffle to my desk in the living room. I mumble a sleepy 'Buenos dias' to Giovanni, who is also inevitably already in the desk in front of mine. The gringo is the lazy one in the house. Work begins.

We scan the morning news for about half an hour. I gamely begin at the bottom of the list of new articles that my RSS feeder (if you don't have one, get one; if you don't know what they are, look them up, then get one) has culled from nearly a hundred sites, but am quickly overwhelmed by the pop-up notifications of the latest news. The feeder will accumulate more than 500 new articles in the course of the day, mostly in Spanish, which is several hundred more than I could ever review in 30 minutes. Ultimately, I choose a couple stories from the bottom of hte list, where I started, a couple from the top, where I end up, then check Google news to make sure I've got the big stories. Simultaneously, Giovanni is talking to me in a foreign language--it starts sounding like Spanish after about an hour--and sending link after link over MSN messenger. After 30 minutes, or really whenever, Adriaan walks in and we have our editorial conference.

Almost all stories fall into two categories: serious or odd. (Nevermind, for a moment, that some of Colombia's regular political stories are seriously odd.) Ongoing developments in the parapolitics scandal, which has found nearly a third of the country's legislators--primarily pro-president Alvaro Uribe ones--were in league with the country's rightist paramilitary groups, have taken a few spots each day. Next up are random business or weather stories--volcano erupts, coffee harvest down, etc. Finally, are the silly ones, like the 26-pound yuca, or cassava, and the virgin that appeared on a water bucket (but more on these in a coming post). When we can combine these two, like doing a textile sales story with a lede about underwear, we are happy men.

Decisions made, me and Adriaan bend our heads and let our fingers fly. I can usually do five to six articles in the roughly four hours--pretty slow considering we don't make a single phone call. My process goes something like this: skim entire article, realize you can't skim in Spanish, read entire article, find there is a word you don't understand a word in a key sentence, paste article into Google translator, waste more time comparing "translation" to Spanish words and working out the real meaning, open Google news to find other stories on the same topic, repeat process. Break for lunch.

As you may now realize, despite our office sitting a block off the dead center of Colombia's second largest city, our work involves nothing you couldn't do with from anywhere in the world with an internet connection. There are a number of reasons for this. Yes, Colombia's low life expectancy for journalists is a unseen, but acknowledged deterrent. Yet more than that, however, is that besides our sports man in Madrid, there is just two of us writing, so just getting the days news out is a struggle. And even more debilitating is that, for me, the local paisa accent often leaves me in blinking uncomprehension. But above all, it's our niche. We get the news out fast. Bite-size summaries are what our readers want. Except when they want to read about virgins...