In 2005, I was offered an “internship” at
Jornal O Dia, in Rio. It was a paid internship, for two years, at
the end of which I would be offered a promotion if I proved myself to be good
enough.
I call it “internship”, between quotation
marks, because even though I was paid half the wages of a “reporter I” (the
first title at “professional” level), I was expected to do the same amount of
work. I would go to uni in the mornings, from 7.30am until 11.30am, and go
straight to the newsroom in the afternoons.
It was called internship because of a pathetic law in Brazil that doesn’t allow newspapers to hire reporters unless
they have a journalism degree. So that opened up an opportunity for newspapers
to hire people in their early 20s, still at uni, for half the amount they would
pay a reporter with a degree, and make them work full time and just as hard. All they had to do was call them interns.
It was a triple whammy for them: I was
cheap, couldn’t join the union, and didn’t have life insurance – so if anything
happened to me at work, my family wouldn’t get a penny from anyone. It was
almost as if there was no sign of my existence, except for the outstanding
amount of column inches I filled every day.
I worked at the showbiz desk. I hated the
showbiz desk. But if I wanted to work at a newspaper, I had to suck up and do
it. My set chores were to write the children’s theatre and dance sections of
the weekend guide, and type up (you read it right) the whole cinema listings
for the week on Tuesdays – an eight-hour task.
Every week, I tried my best to get features
and stories in the daily showbiz supplement, Caderno D, and, more often than
not, I succeeded. Still, not my favourite thing.
I usually worked as much overtime as I
could fit in, so I would get paid more. Eventually, I saw myself working
closely with the Saturday editor (fashion editor), Marcia Disitzer, the most
amazing person ever. She invested in me – so much so she even left me in charge
of editing her fashion column whenever she was away.
The best thing, however, were the mandatory
weekend shifts. God, I loved those.
As I wrote here before, those were our
crime shifts. We worked on a rota, and had to do one weekend every four weeks.
I’d sometimes take on other people’s shifts if I needed the money or had
nothing planned for the weekend (yeah, I know…).
Even though the everyday work at the
showbiz desk taught me the basics of journalism – news writing, accuracy, law
(we wrote a lot about celebrities), the ins-and-outs of a daily publication –
it was at the news desk that I felt truly at home as a cub reporter.
I would normally do the 7am shifts on both
Saturday and Sunday. I remember the 7am shifts weren’t really meant for
beginners – you had to take over from the night shift, and make sure nothing
went unnoticed, so you could pass it on to the news editor, who usually arrived
at 7.30am, sometimes 8am.
If you were on the 7am shift, there was
also the possibility you would get a call in the middle of the night, telling
you a newspaper driver would pick you up at 5.30am because a high-profile
drugs’ lord had been killed, and the news desk needed support. That happened to
me once.
And you would be on your own, running the
news-gathering in the newsroom while the teams (reporters and snappers) were
away, and the news editor too busy getting reports from the scene.
O Dia’s newsroom had something called the “bug
room” (not for phone-hacking or individual surveillance, just to be clear). It
was a tiny corner room with big glass windows all round, from where I could see
my news editor, who sat in a strategic position, sort of at the top of the
news desk, right in the middle.
In that room, I had a phone, a computer,
and two radio scanners used to scan the police frequency. Technically, it
was illegal to do that – but everyone knew all newspapers had a similar room,
police included. Any time they even hinted at trying to shut it down, the press
would cry out censorship, and ask why they needed secrecy attending incidents
around the city.
There was, and still is (though I hear
police managed to get themselves unlistenable radio frequencies these days), a
clear and absolute public interest in monitoring the activities of a knowingly
corrupt and murderous police force, and I’ll forever defend the activities of
Jornal O Dia and others in Rio.
So my job, for sometimes 14 hours per
shift, was to make sure we knew everything that was going on in Rio and
surrounding districts. I would have to phone a hundred and something police
stations (civil police), to ask whether they had any crimes reported in their
area, the other hundred and something military police battalions to ask if they
had been called to any crime scenes or incidents, plus the other hundred and
something fire brigades, to check if any incidents had happened overnight, in
case the night shift hadn’t picked them up, or they’d happened after they
called.
I would keep in touch with my colleagues
from other newspapers – we all had the same sources for incidents that had just
happened (unless someone had called in), so we shared what we had and consulted
each other to decide whether it was safe to send a team to an incident.
Newspapers aren’t very popular with drug
dealers in Rio, for obvious reasons, so we would always have to be careful
about ambushes and traps, and not exposing our reporters to any unnecessary danger.
My main jobs were to know everything, send
my news editor hourly updates, make sure our reporters didn’t get killed
(sometimes we had to trust our instincts before sending teams out to incidents
and that was terrifying), write all the straightforward news stories, and talk to
oddballs on the phone. There were plenty of calls from good old Rio oddballs.
The news editor, Hilka Telles, was a scary
middle-aged woman. Award-winning crime reporter with decades of experience, and
tough as a rock. Everyone was frightened of her. I loved her. She would sit
there with her big hair, chain smoking (the newspaper had enforced a smoking ban,
but she was the only person allowed to smoke in the newsroom because of her 40-a-day
habit), telling people with her fag hag voice what journalism was all about.
 |
| Hilka Telles on the phone as a young reporter at an 80s "bug room" in Rio. This one was at Jornal do Brasil |
Sometimes Hilka would relieve me from being
in the “bug room” and send me out to incidents (never the hairy ones because I
didn’t have life insurance, though I’ve been in the cross-fire a couple of
times).
She used to call the showbiz desk “celeb
whores” and our colorful hipster desks “whore dressers” – I could hardly
contain a giggle whenever she said that. She was so right.
And I loved all that. For reasons I cannot
explain, because I don’t want to identify them, I had many sources in the
police force, even a couple in the elite squad, so I would often sneak into the
other side of the newsroom, where the news desk was, and give her stories.
Sometimes she would let me work on them, sometimes the showbiz editor would
tell us both off, so I had to surrender the story to one of the crime reporters.
By the end of it all, nearly in 2007, I was
offered a “reporter I” position. I hadn't finished my degree yet, but whenever they came across "outstanding" cub reporters, they used a loophole to hire them as reporters (legally they would be hired as "autonomous workers", in practice, they were reporters), so they promised me a position.
Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, I had
already decided to move to the UK, for personal reasons. I loved every crime
shift I did at that newspaper, every story I wrote, every scary
situation I was thrown in, but the nearly two years of exploitation had taken
their toll. I wanted a bit of change, and some employment rights too. But I still miss it dearly.
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