Two Carleton journalism graduates are off to Cape Town, South Africa from Sept. 17-19 to speak about their efforts to bring an African news wire back to life.
“It’s one of the pre-eminent journalism events in Africa,” said Scott McNeil, who will be presenting to hundreds of journalists from across the continent at the Highway Africa conference.
Along with fellow journalism grad Jennifer Pagliaro, McNeil will be talking about their work to revive the Gemini News Project, a now-defunct newswire originally founded in 1967.
The London-based wire service distributed feature stories written about the developing world, with the focus on larger development issues such as access to water and health care, McNeil said.
“For the most part, the correspondents were journalists from the countries they were writing about,” said Carleton journalism professor Allan Thompson, who has been trying to get Gemini running again since first arriving at Carleton.
Thompson worked for Gemini in 1990, spending eight months at the organization’s London headquarters and four months as a correspondent in North Africa.
Gemini’s stories were sold to small news outlets around the world, primarily in Africa. There were also readers in the industrialized world, including the Toronto Star.
“It focused on stories specifically that the big Western news agencies would not pay attention to,” Thompson said.
But the newswire ran into financial problems, and was bailed out several times before finally running out of cash in 2002, Thompson said.
“The reason why Gemini failed in the first place is because the business model wasn’t successful,” Thompson said. “It didn‘t earn enough revenue to pay the cost.”
Over the next several months, the team will talk with journalists and potential clients to develop a sustainable business model, McNeil said. The project has received a $60,000 grant from the Canadian International Development Research Centre to fund this first phase.
Carleton students have already produced a working prototype of Gemini by putting together a website featuring the work of African journalists. The project was the culminating effort of a journalism class Thompson taught last winter.
“It was a course meant to connect Carleton students with working journalists in Africa,” Thompson said.
“We basically just had conversations with these journalists, and it’s way more engaging to learn that way,” said Pagliaro, who was one of the students in the course.
“I think what we set out to do was prove that it’s possible, and I think we proved that,” Pagliaro said.
Eventually, Thompson said he envisions Gemini as another workshop for fourth-year journalism students, who would edit and distribute stories written by African journalists.
“Their primary role would be editors, producers, graphic artists, designers,” Thompson said.
The project is still in its early stages, and it could take several years before it becomes a part of Carleton’s curriculum. But Thompson said he’s optimistic.
“I think there is a lot of interest among current journalism students in the role of journalism in the developing world,” Thompson said, noting student interest in Carleton’s Rwanda Initiative, which he founded.
African journalists are also enthusiastic about the opportunity to pitch stories to a major wire like Gemini, Thompson said.
“There’s a real appetite for a new news service,” Thompson said.
