The man with the TV camera …

In the print media, the journalism routine usually revolves around gathering information in scrap books and packaging it into a fairly readable piece. To do this, a son of man has to bang furiously and incessantly away at a computer keyboard, as though their entire life depended on it. More fondly, it’s called “typing away”. For radio reporters, the brief normally involves approaching or accosting news sources with voice recorder and microphone poised for a sound bite. A radio scribe is to forever be found in the possession of a recorder, spare cassettes and batteries, microphone plus, of course, a khaki waistcoat with thousands of pockets in which to hide his tools of trade. Then there are the TV journalists, whose gizmo gadgets everybody has got to literally bow down to whenever one moves within range of their usually protracted zooming lenses. When you go to a function and the TV crews have already set their equipment up, all you can do is start preparing well in advance for that stupid feeling that comes with trampling over the intricate web of TV cables, thereby disrupting the filming process. All TV journalists operate under license: They are licensed to ask, if not order anyone in the house to literally “move it” to another seat, if only to give their second eyes a better vantage point.Ironically, Tele scribes are often the first to appear (and set up equipment) at any media function. Typically, TV crews start to arrive at the venue as early as an hour to the event, usually in the name of prospecting for the best spots in which to situate their camera stands and tripods. Which makes me reluctant to “move it” whenever a camera-wielding TV scribe who wants a better vantage point for his lenses accosts me. The reason you arrived earlier than everybody else was to, I thought, secure the best position in which to rig your set. At the pre-event press conference for the just concluded Rwanda Film Festival at the Goethe Institute in Kiyovu, the power of the TV camera was much in evidence. Being a film festival that was being unveiled, there were of course scores of those monstrous, nearly intimidating beasts that video cameras and video recording equipment have since evolved into. The owners of these beasts were, needless to say, foreign journalists and TV crews eager to grab footage for their various home audiences. What most of these people did was to conduct the filming from the comfort of their seats, placing the cameras on their laps the way that we do with lap tops. While at this, they seemed totally oblivious to the fact that even we, the pen-and-notebook based scribes also aspired to move with ease around the conference room. If anything, we had equally important pictures to capture on our humble, pocket-size digital cameras.