Building a newsroom in the early transition days
I arrived to start up the Warsaw Business Journal with a strong feeling of unease. It wasn't the business model that had a good track record in Budapest and points east. But was Poland, and I, ready for it?
Starting a newsroom from scratch was an opportunity I didn't want to pass up. But what I knew about Warsaw didn't necessarily spell a welcome mat for building a news operation. Opportunity, certainly. Nothing quite like it existed, but maybe there was a reason.
Before the 1994 arrival, my most recent stay here had been two years earlier, when I came as part of a team providing workshops for print and broadcast journalists. Those were the days when the nation was in the throes of a medieval tale. Then-President Lech Walesa was trying to slay his red nemesis with one hand as his Solidarity entourage splintered into a multitude of warring factions.
Many in the press were highly motivated, albeit with a political axe to grind. There was also a lot of fluff and disorganization. A newsroom in Katowice was populated by desks with typewriters. All reporters, I was told, wrote their stories at home. At Wiadomosci, in Telewizja Polska's (TVP) downtown Warsaw headquarters, I even sat in the director's chair. It was a political hot seat, then vacant because it was the flavor-of-the-month prime minister season. And a bizarre flavor had just vacated the government's top post. Waldemar Pawlak, who as head of the Peasants Party stood strongly opposed to the reformist agenda, had taken the reigns in what could only be called a quirk of fate. With Pawlak gone, it was anybody's guess what might ensue in the cabinet and nobody in the news business wanted to step into TVP's top news spot.
When the kitchen heated up, all the news chefs literally got out of town. Disorganized, partisan, I wasn't about ready to bet the farm on building a quality news staff in Warsaw.
I first came to Poland as a student in the early 1980s. Soon after arriving, police officers murdered priest Jerzy Popieluszko. That led to a news blackout, further darkening already gray, depression-era days. Jerzy Urban, a J-school educated member of the nomenklatura, gave the spoken word for the government and students laughed. But he who laughs last Urban, head of a satirical weekly that most people read behind closed doors, now drives a slick green Jag to work. But Urban, too, faced his journalistic trial by fire, battling a Walesa-led attack in the early 1990s. Urban won, citing a free press defense in the early 1990s that was remarkably similar to the Hustler defense of Larry Flynt.
The economic and political front was equally in disarray. Tension, the bread-and-butter of news writing, abounded in the new economy. But what was fertile ground for the last breed of Cold War correspondents, was not necessarily a long-term strategy for a free-market, community-based publication. After Poles threw out Leszek Balcerowicz and the Jan Bielecki government in late 1991, Poland Inc. started drifting and people seemed doomed to recycling history. During the interwar period, the country ran aground, directionless, and asked a former general to resume the reigns of leadership. In post-communist Poland, Walesa was fulfilling that role but a plan and vision were lacking.
By the general elections of 1993, the reformist camp, or what was left of it, was replaced by post-communists. But far from being a bad move, kicking out reformers proved a blessing, which I only realized as I began to start the publication.
Spirited reformers I'd known were now in the private, entrepreneurial sector, finding out how to make their businesses work and eager to tell all their stories. Moreover, everybody had to put out or shut up. Post-communists, too. By electing post-communists and setting the political pendulum in motion, Poles had begun a vetting process, flushing away the Cold War rhetoric of a communist bogeymen, something Russia has yet to experience. Democracy was working, Polish style and Poland was on the road to becoming a leading regional economy.
That fact was brought home two years ago at an investor conference in Bucharest when a Romanian banker noted: "But things are going well in Poland." I had to agree. Yes, Poland has traveled a long way from the dark eyes of the depression, through the starry-eyed, but no less firey days of the early transition.
On the journalism front, battles have been fought and won. Many of my earlier concerns about starting the Business Journal have long been answered. We've built a quality newsroom with motivated staff. Our reach has stretched beyond the business community and independent, objective coverage is now a respected practice among professionals.
The concept of a free press and its role in a democracy still have yet to be embraced by the general public. A notable thorn is an old practice of sources authorizing stories, which stems from the nomenklatura days, when information was parceled out to control the masses. Still in force, this law not only hampers the free flow of timely information to the public at large, it lets sources control the news agenda. That lesson was learned in the 1950s, when a Wisconsin senator, Joseph McCarthy, was able to manipulate the U.S. news agenda and subsequently launch a frenzy of purgings fueled by fear and hate. A lesson not to be forgotten by the press or the public there.
The rocky days of the transition have past, but this is only the beginning. Poland, having long carried a martyr complex of a nation occupied by foreign powers, must don a new uniform of confidence and leadership. Bright minds and talented people are needed to chart directions for the nation's second decade of independence. Time never stands still.
Stephen Kirkland was the editor of the WBJ from 1994-1997. He now edits the WBJ's Lokale real estate section.
