By Professor Abiodun Adeniyi
Book title: A Reporter And His Beat
Author: Yinka Fabowale
Publisher: Floy Publications
Pages: 306
Year of Publication: 2022
THIS is one more addition to the growing list of media practitioners’ book- length experiences. It enhances the narrative of change from news reporting to tome writing, aside from further exposing the discourse on the limitless possibilities of the newshounds.
The crack practitioner is immersed, often ensconced in the rigorous process of detailing ever endless events. He is primed to pursue stories, to interpret, and analyse them to perfection. Perfection is always, however, still in the distance, stretching away from the arms of the active journalist.
Within the matrix is, nevertheless, an inner zeal, sometimes coasting home to a sense of fulfillment, but dimming the practitioner’s ability to detour. Detouring is not escapable, if to externalize the vast experience of practice, the conscious and unconscious experimentations, and the reflections on personal vision, mission and life objectives.
The professional needs some detouring to document travails, travels, tests, and triumphs, not just for the younger practitioners, students, researchers, neutral readers, and much else, but also to relieve the self of the inner burden to give back, by sharing life’s lessons from a personal prism.
The book at hand is in the above direction, detouring from the beat, from the daily strive to beat deadlines, and earn a byline, from the short, precise narrative weaved around patterns and peculiarity of news reporting to the much more expressive writing, revealing hitherto hidden qualities expansive enough to educate, inform, and entertain in what intertwines with the mission of journalism.
Fabowale’s exposition also transcends that last point. His delivery is courageous in places, for telling personal challenges and how some other decisions would have produced different results. He did not pretend to be heroic (as some similar literature would do) but only rendering the facts, feats, fortunes, and foibles of his journalism drives for the reader to appreciate.
From that angle, however, his professional brilliance and resilience are revealed, as exemplified in the many positive appraisals he got, and in the strength of his character to pull through challenges.
His prose is lucid, while the depth of his interpretations is unmistakable. His logic is sound, and so is the organization of his thoughts. A good read for a wide range of audience, for the purity of his presentation, the beauty of his language and the huge lessons within.
- Adeniyi, Ph.D. (Leeds), is professor of Communication, Baze University, Abuja.
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