TEACHING THE POWER OF THE PRESS IN YEMEN

From the Groton Advantage newspaper in Massachusetts

A standing-room-only crowd packed a conference room at the public library last week to hear a firsthand account of a local resident’s journey to far off Yemen and her adventures in trying to plant the seeds of professional journalism there among a band of eager students.

Jennifer Steil’s book, “The Woman Who Fell From the Sky: An American Journalist in Yemen,” has just been published by Random House.

Steil, a former student at Lawrence Academy, spent three years in Yemen, a small country located at the southern end of the Arabian peninsula, where she acted as editor in chief for The Yemen Observer.

A native of Groton, Steil earned a degree in journalism from Columbia’s graduate school of journalism, as well as an MFA in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College.

After writing for various publications, including Time, Life, Good Housekeeping, Woman’s Day, and even Playgirl, Steil became senior editor of The Week in 2001. In between freelancing and helping to get The Week off the ground, she was sidetracked to Yemen, a country commonly believed to be a staging ground for terrorist incursions into Saudi Arabia.

“I had no plans to go to the Middle East,” admitted Steil.

After running into an old acquaintance who invited her to accompany him to Yemen to help train aspiring reporters there, Steil balked, wary of giving up a successful career in New York City. In the end, however, she decided to use a three-week vacation to travel to Yemen. “I had the most incredible three weeks,” declared Steil of her subsequent experience. “I felt incredibly useful there, like I never did before.”

Energized by the enthusiasm of her students — half of whom were female — and their eagerness not only to learn the craft of reporting but its ethical standards, her return to New York seemed unexciting by comparison, and soon after she found herself on a plane bound for the Middle East. Untroubled by reports of widespread resentment of westerners in general and Americans in particular, Steil arrived in country to a warm reception by everyone she met, and was immediately plunged into the culture of Yemen, enjoying its cuisine, observing how people lived, and visiting sites of a land whose history extends as far back as the 12th century BC.

“My experience in Yemen formed the most wonderful four years of my life,” said Steil as she went on to read excerpts from her new book, telling stories of her first journalism class, explaining to her students the power of the press and the difficulties she had on her the first day as editor in chief of the Observer.

Lured back to Yemen in 2006 partially on the basis of being in complete charge of a major English-language newspaper (circulation 5,000), Steil talked about her hectic first days, training eager but inexperienced reporters, and juggling her idea of the role of the newspaper as balanced source of information against the interests of the establishment.

Eventually, time came to let go and after returning to the United States, she learned that the organization she left behind at the Observer had fallen apart. A new editor in chief alienated the reporters causing many of best to quit and he himself was soon let go.

Steil said that the title of her book, “The Woman Who Fell From the Sky,” was taken from a Yemeni poem and seemed to fit her unexpected sojourn in a country most people would have a hard time even finding on a map.