Weekly Vocation

A Weekly Journalist’s Life and Crimes

There are lots of things I’ve come to enjoy about working at a small weekly newspaper. For one, I can’t get enough of the crazies who work these jobs, and I like that staff is so limited that I can get my fingerprints on almost every story. Most of all, I like the desperation.

It’s always a mad rush to meet a deadline, but more than that, these news organizations, and the people who run them, assume the traits of men on the lamb. The UB post steals its English-language horoscopes from some hippie web page (it doesn’t have sufficient personnel to write its own). At the weekly where I worked before, journalists pretended to be regular guests at a hotel to get free breakfast.

Weekly papers always seem one slip away from not making it to print; the writers one slip away from bouncing a check. Despite this pressure, all non-student journalists I’ve met exhaustively fact check mundane details and prefer an accurate, objective story to sleep. I aspire to be like these poor malnourished people.

Day one on the Job

Toward that end, I set out an hour before work started in search of the Mongol News Company building and the start of my career at the UB Post. Heading north past Suhkbatar square (Ulaanbaatar’s expansive mall dedicated to government and independence from the Chinese), I quickly found that stones and pavement no longer cover the sidewalks, while the number of pot holes, uncovered manholes, and regular holes increases dramatically. In this city you very literally have to watch your step, and I almost took a few body length plunges into garbage and rocks when I forgot this maxim.

After a lot of walking, turning around and then more walking, I arrived at the Mongol News Building. This gray structure was unfortunately not the Mongol News Company building, and to keep this short, with the help of some very nice Mongolian citizens, I found a stranger who drove me to the right place for 1,000 tugreg’s (a little less than $1).

I walked into the office 5 minutes late, just after 10 a.m. (If you’re an ex-pat you call this Mongolian time, or as some British lady told me, “a damn civilized time to start your day”). The Mongol News Company building sits at the edge of a promenade with a beer garden in an oversized ger (tent) and a baragian market under blue cloth tarps. On the tall side for UB, it looks like a mid-sized gray hotel and houses a television station, an ad agency, at least 4 newspapers, and a photo shop all owned by the company.

Colleagues: Room in the office

The office reserved for the UB Post is a good sized room, but we have to share it with the sports paper whose employees watch music videos and snore throughout the day. Our half of the office has five desks which means, following my employment, the paper has a 1.25 to 1 desk to person ratio.

At the desk with the layout computer sits Sumiyabazar, the 29 year-old editor who loves t-shirts, pops his collar, and resembles a Mongolian Dilbert. I like him already. I sit at a desk facing the clock and behind me is Kirril, the friendly Australian who followed his “crazy American girlfriend” to Mongolia and works part time as a journalist and part time as English teacher. Across from him is Bulgamaa who speaks English diffidently, likes to laugh, write about economics, and gave me a cookie today.

And that’s it. That’s the whole staff. On my first day I worked for 9 hours editing stories and making a database for contacts so that the UB Post can do away with its cache of business cards. Editing can be brutal, especially when some of the non-native speaker English needs extra polishing. I wrestled with this sentence for a while before giving up.

All in a day’s work

“Since 2003, every Mongolian family was allowed to own land, but no more than 0.7 hectares would be granted free. After the amendment, every citizen would be granted land from the day they were born, but only 0.7 hectares would be free”

If you have suggestions, please let me know. In spite of some frustrations, I really enjoyed my first day. One of the best things about working for a paper is that you feel like an expert on a place after a short time, in this case apparently, one day. Sitting at my desk, I didn’t realize that I was hungry or tired until I looked at the clock and saw that it was a few minutes before 8:00 p.m. Those who know me well will think this is a small miracle. If I have to work for a living, writing and reading may not be such a bad way to do it.