Journalist recounts visit to Iraq

Archie Tse speaks to students in two journalism classes.

3:20 p.m., March 15, 2004--From his days as a rookie reporter at The Review through an 11-year career at two major American newspapers, Archie Tse sketched and created numerous graphics to illustrate and illuminate a wide range of topics, but never from a war zone.

That changed late last year when an editor at The New York Times, where he has worked since 1995, told him that the paper wanted to send a graphics reporter to Iraq.

“I had just come back to The Times in September after taking a year off to do some personal things,” Tse said. “I said yes. While I had done a lot of graphics reporting in America, I had never done a foreign assignment.”

Tse was on campus March 8, speaking to students from Ben Yagoda’s E308 “Reporter’s Practicum” and Dennis Jackson’s E407 “Advanced Reporting” classes in Gore Hall.

Before setting foot in Baghdad, Tse said he spent a week in England, where he joined other journalists and British contractors bound for Iraq to help rebuild the country.

“They taught us how to recognize land mines and bombs of all shapes and sizes,” Tse said. “They also told us not to pick up any strange looking stuff while walking around in Iraq.”

The training included what Tse described as some realistic-looking simulations depicting the possible consequences of what can happen when military and handmade explosive devices are activated.

“This was a really good way to force you to think about whether or not you really want to be doing this,” Tse said. “It makes you reach deep down in yourself. It really was a tough week.”

To get to Baghdad, Tse and fellow Times graphic reporter Ed Wong flew from the United Kingdom to Amman, Jordan, and then decided to go by car to the Iraqi capital.

“A day before we got to Iraq, some insurgents had successfully shot at and hit an airplane,” Tse said. “Going by car also was dangerous, because a lot of people were getting their cars robbed on the way to Iraq.”

The building that housed the Times staff in Baghdad was a sandbag-ringed structure not far from the Tigris River. Tse shared the house with about eight other Times staffers, plus Iraqi guards, drivers, translators and a cook.

“My bedroom was in the basement,” Tse said. “I felt pretty safe in the basement and decided to stay down there.”

While parts of Baghdad were like any other city, with people going to work and doing their shopping, Tse said there also were scenes of American soldiers driving by in armored vehicles and tanks guarding gas stations.

“There was a scene where an improvised explosive device went off and killed some people,” Tse said. “Within a few hours, the Iraqis had posted up a death notice. These contain the same information that would appear in an American newspaper obituary.”

While the average newspaper reader or television viewer has an idea of how a print or broadcast journalist works, Tse said many people have no idea what a graphics reporter does.

“I am a reporter. I gather information and synthesize it and decide what I’m going to do with the information,” Tse said. “I need to look for the stories that can best be expressed with graphics. I went to Iraq looking for these kinds of stories.”

Tse said that good sources for stories from Iraq included military press briefings and just getting out among the people as they went about their daily lives.

“When you stay out in the field, you develop a sense of geography and chronology,” Tse said. “We would get detailed information, and I would put together a time line of events.”

It was not unusual, Tse said, for a graphics team to work from 4 p.m. to midnight, putting together information to send to an editor in New York City.

“Graphics are a team effort. One person might sketch, another will report and possibly a third person would work on doing the chronology,” Tse said. “One person just can’t produce the graphics needed by deadline.”

The biggest news story that happened during Tse’s Iraqi stay was the capture of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein on Dec. 13. Saddam was found hiding in a hole in the ground about nine miles from his hometown of Tikrit.

Because he could not get to Tikrit immediately, Tse went to the U.S. military briefing room in Baghad, where he was struck by the reaction of Iraqi journalists to the news of Saddam’s capture.

“The room was packed with a lot of Iraqi journalists, and when they announced the news, they were overwhelmed,” Tse said. “They were so moved, that the news conference had to be stopped for a few minutes.”

The biggest challenge faced by Tse and Wong was converting documents presented by the military into comprehensible information that the editors at The Times could use to create graphic images for the paper’s next edition.

To demonstrate the challenge, Tse passed out samples of the Pentagon information to the class and asked them to sketch their versions of Saddam’s hiding place.

“To do graphics, you don’t have to be an artist, but you do have to know how to conceptualize,” Tse said. “We try to convert the information into a three-dimensional format. We don’t want to misrepresent anything—our responsibility as journalists is to get it right.”

Tse said that when he actually visited the site, he found it to be much different than his conceptualization based on the first diagrams provided by the military.

“We only found this out because we went there,” Tse said. “The second graphic differed widely from the one we created based on the original information that the military gave us. This is important because my duty is to make things accurate.”

While he said he enjoyed the challenge of reporting from Iraq, Tse said his most satisfying work at The Times was covering the events of Sept. 11, 2001, in the days immediately after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

“This was the most rewarding work I have done so far, because the people really needed us at that time,” Tse said. “I felt that the time I spent at The Times before 9/11 was training for what actually happened.”

Tse, who attended UD from 1986-93, was on the staff of The Review from 1989-92 and was executive editor during the 1991-92 academic year, when the paper won its first-ever Pacemaker Award from the Associated Collegiate Press.
He also was the recipient of five national awards for layout and design in a competition sponsored by the University of Missouri. He worked at the Philadelphia Inquirer before joining The Times in 1995.

Though Tse did not graduate from UD, he credits UD’s English journalism program and The Review with launching his career in newspapers.

“The Review is the place where you get to try the whole gamut of writing and presentation styles,” Tse said. “The experience there basically launched me into the career I now have.”

Article by Jerry Rhodes
Photo by Duane Perry

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