Adeyeye Joseph is a feature writer at the Lagos-based THIS DAY in Nigeria. He recently spent two months in Germany participating in an environmental reporting. The skills he learned, however, had a much further reach than the name of the course implies.

In a two part series, RAP 21 examines Josephs experience at the International Institute for Journalism in Berlin, and what he brought back to Nigeria - both on a professional and personal level - from this once-in-a-lifetime experience. The course spanned two months and included practical writing exercises, lectures and visits to various organisations. Although the course focused on environmental reporting, Joseph concedes that the realities making environmental issues a priority within his newspapers remains a challenge: Environmental story ideas only become important when lots of lives are lost. I would be lying if I say my training in Berlin would propel me to write more about environmental issues. I really wish! But the odds are not in my favour. Politics, economy and ’ bad’ news receive more space and coverage in Nigeria and of course they get the lion share of the resources.

To help combat this trend, Adeyeye Joseph has taken to heart the advice offered by Paul Brown, of the British Guardian newspaper: After telling us that environmental stories are not so well regarded even by Western editors he advised us to always structure our ideas in such a way that an interesting aspect of the environmental story is what we sell to our editor. That way, the story gets approved not as an environmental story, then we can go ahead and give full vent to the initial idea.

Since returning from Germany, Joseph has tried to put into practice, a significant part of what he learned in theory: I am trying to sell to my editors that we should write less and not just write to fill up spaces. In the course of the training I realised we ’overwrite’ and fill our articles with the unnecessary while trying to fill up spaces. Since I got back I have tried to write less and well. As a matter of fact, in Nigeria the reporter is under pressure not only to find stories to write them in such a way that they are certain to fill up a page or two. And that’s where what I consider to be a problem comes in. Not only does this make clever fabrication a tempting option, often, it also encumbers the story with unnecessary quotes, drab descriptions and lengthy data from secondary sources. Of course, these usually sap the life out of an otherwise interesting story. So what I am trying to offer for the section that I ’handle’ is to try and cut off this garbage and get the story across in the briefest but best way possible.

Despite this tendency in the Nigerian market, Adeyeye Joseph believes, however, that the differences between European media and those found within Nigeria, are in fact slight: Somehow, Nigerian newspapers tend to quickly pick up new trends and tricks as soon as they spring up in Europe. For example, in recent years European newspapers seem to be adding some bit of measured colour to news reporting, a departure from the straight-forward business it was in the past. Nigerian dailies - even the most conservative, The Guardian - have also toed that line.

And maybe that is where our problems, even though of different degrees, also seem to be the same. I think journalists on both sides of the divide are in need of much training and retraining. Of course Europe has a much larger pool to draw from. Whereas you’d get only a handful of guys writing really well in an average national paper down South (read ’developing’ nations) the number of guys you would find doing same up North (’developed’ world) are of course more. A lot of whoppers that escape our sub-editors and make it to the printed page would certainly not escape the eagle eyed subs at The Guardian or The New York Times, but yet...

The case that forcibly comes to mind is that of Jayson Blair, a reporter for the New York Times who resigned from the newspaper last year when he was caught having falsified a number of stories.

Next week: Looking for the story within the story, putting the spotlight on the instructors, and the value of meeting people from different cultures