Never leave any question in a reader’s mind

The Sunday Nation’s glib allusion to “Land CS” must have flummoxed all the foreigners who arrived in Nairobi on Sunday morning for their first visit to Kenya. For, if information is your stock- in-trade — as this and Kenya’s other news publications claim — the question is ineluctable: What on earth is a “Land CS”?

Such parlance may be familiar to many Kenyans. But what about the myriad of human beings who arrive in Kenya for the first time every morning or who subscribe to your newspaper from far-away climes?

On their behalf, I ask again: If information is what you are in the market for, what — among your commodities — is a “Land CS”? What information do those two words convey to a tourist who buys your newspaper immediately upon arrival in Nairobi from Alberta, Darwin, Kamchatka, Land’s End, Mai-Lai, Orlando, Saskatchewan and Tierra del Fuego?

SHIFTING ALLIANCES

Yet every day, I imagine the frustration of the foreigner who, arriving in Nairobi for the first time, picks up a copy of any one of our news publications and, in a prominent page, reads as follows: “The ouster of former Lands CS Charity Ngilu is likely to mark new battle lines and shifting alliances in the lower Eastern region as the country readies for the 2017 elections...” (Sunday Nation, November 29, 2015).

For the reporter and the sub-editor concerned — two of the weekender’s most important information purveyors — the question is stark and staring: What on this earth is a “Lands CS”? What, in any case, is a “CS”?

Perhaps local readers are resigned to this shoddy reporting. For they speak to one another in exactly the same sketchy manner. Thus every page of every one of our newspapers contains allusions, abbreviations, aphorisms, whatnot, which you can understand only if you live in Kenya and only if you are a regular print media consumer.

INTERNATIONAL SUBSCRIBERS

What should be pumped into every reporter’s and every sub-editor’s head is that they are writing and editing for all kinds of readers — including, locals, visitors and international subscribers — and that, therefore, no phrase should be allowed into any page that may raise any question mark in any reader’s head.

Any reporter and sub-editor with a modicum of intelligence should see why — even in a caption — the term “CS” will frustrate beyond measure all your readers in Accra, Addis Ababa, Geneva, Harare, Little Rock, Melbourne, Pyongyang and probably even Tabora and Tororo.

That is why all reporters and sub-editors are duty-bound to ensure that nothing enters their newspaper which may raise any question mark in any reader’s head anywhere in the world. All reporters and sub-editors must ensure that every time they use a word like harambee, it will not cause any mental agony in a reader in Alberta, Chicago, Luang Prabang, Lagos, Madras and Valparaiso.

The usual way to deal with an item like “CS” is to immediately follow it up, on first mention, with the full version in brackets. Thereafter, the abbreviated form will suffice till the end of the story.

Philip Ochieng is a veteran journalist