SZETO
Reports During a summer internship at the Middle East Monitor, Hannah Szeto ’20 dove headfirst into the complicated world of Middle Eastern affairs and online journalism. BY MUNA AL-ALUL
W
hen Hannah Szeto ’20 thought about a productive way to spend the summer of her junior year, an internship sounded like the perfect solution. It would give her the opportunity to learn something 16
BEYOND KING’S
new, while exploring a field of work that she had an interest in. Although she planned to spend the summer in the United Kingdom, Szeto — who, as a senior this year, is co-president of the King’s Academy Student Leadership Council — knew that she wanted to work somewhere
with a connection to Middle Eastern affairs. She began reaching out to relevant charities, trusts and nongovernmental organizations to ask if they were taking on interns. She soon discovered that finding an organization willing to take on a teenage intern for two months was not as easy as she
had hoped, and the few responses she did get back were mostly in the negative. So when the Middle East Monitor (MEMO), an online news agency and media monitoring network based in London, responded to her email with, “When do you want to start?” she jumped at the opportunity. According to MEMO, the use or misuse of information is central to the conflict in the Middle East, and so the organization was established to fill a gap in information gathering, analysis and dissemination, while providing focused and comprehensive coverage of Palestine and its regional neighbors. “What I really like about Middle East Monitor is that it’s a bridge between the Middle East and the rest of the world,” says Szeto. “A lot of our news is not original; we look at Arabic news sources and translate them into English to make them more accessible to a Western audience.” However, working with Arabic content posed a challenge to Szeto, a Hong Kong native, because of her limited knowledge of Arabic. “I felt bad because there is so much more news out there that I could have reported on if my Arabic was better,” says Szeto. “Google translation isn’t reliable, so I ended up texting headlines to Dario [Pomar ’19] or Sayf [Abdeen ’19] to ask them to give me the general meaning.” Writing in a journalistic style was another challenge that Szeto faced, but quickly overcame thanks to her experience writing for school publications like The Rexonian and Beyond King’s. “I have more experience writing opinion and creative pieces, and I’m an editor for Al Majnoonah [King’s student magazine], but I didn’t have much experience writing news pieces,” says Szeto. “At first, I had a lot of trouble writing articles because I didn’t know MEMO’s style, or how to write journalistically. It took me a couple of weeks to get used to it.” Szeto credits her mentor at MEMO with helping her learn the journalistic style, and about internet journalism in particular, which by nature needs to be “as short and punchy as possible.”
“I’d send my mentor a piece and she would say, no, this isn’t how you write a news article. She helped me become more direct in my writing,” says Szeto. “At the beginning, she would sit down with me and ask me what was wrong with what I wrote and help me figure out how to change it. Once I got the hang of it, she didn’t have to make as many changes. They started off giving me an article a day to write, and it grew to a few a day.” In addition to learning a new writing style, working for MEMO also gave Szeto a greater appreciation for journalism in general, and particularly in the Middle East.
It was always a depressing start to my day when I would have to write one of those stories about a Palestinian child being arrested for stone throwing.
“I was writing these articles and people were actually reading them, and I realized that this is how people get their information,” explains Szeto. “It made me more cautious when I wrote, I knew I had to make it accurate and informative. It gave me a greater appreciation for what journalists do.” Providing comprehensive coverage of Palestine and its regional neighbors, is a large part of what Middle East Monitor does. However, being on the forefront of what was often negative news could be difficult, Szeto found, especially as she took on a lot of the reporting about Palestine and Jordan during the internship. “It was emotionally draining,” says Szeto. “It was always a depressing start to my day when I would have to write one of those stories about a Palestinian child being arrested for stone throwing.” She also learned one of the hard truths about journalism: sometimes
important stories are passed over for more “interesting” news. “It was a bit difficult in that sense. I was like, 'Don’t you care about the children being arrested anymore?’ All of it is worth reporting on, but you can only do so much.” But not all of the articles Szeto worked on were disheartening. During her internship, she worked on at least 60 articles on a range of subjects covering politics and economics, tourism, art and culture. “The fun articles were the ones about Twitter trends,” laughs Szeto. “Whenever I felt like I didn’t want to write about depressing things, I would go and see what was happening on Arabic Twitter.” One of Szeto’s articles, about celebrity Bella Hadid allegedly insulting Saudi Arabia and the UAE, was shared almost 5,000 times (to date) and made it to the number one spot in the “trending section” on MEMO, beating out breaking news at the time about the death of former Egyptian president Mohammad Morsi. “I thought, ‘Is this what people really care about?’ But it was nice to see my article shared so many times.” The articles that Szeto was proudest to have written, however, were the ones that involved the most work and self-initiative, whether in terms of time, research or interviews. One of those was a profile of Palestinian author Ghassan Kanafani to mark the anniversary of his death. Szeto particularly enjoyed revisiting the author’s life and work having read a number of his short stories in class at King’s. Of all the articles she wrote, her favorite is one titled “In US universities students who criticize Israel are under attack.” “That is the one I spent the most time on and did the most work on,” says Szeto. “I had to interview a number of university students about their experiences speaking out about Israel on campus and about the activist community there. That was the article I felt the proudest of, because I did so much research and reached out to so many people. I wasn’t just looking up news, I was creating news.” SPRING 2020
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