Katerina Zachovalova

Today Katerina Zachovalova (DPA), Rob Cameron (BBC)
 and Jeremy Druker (TOL) talked to EJI students in Prague about fixers,
 foreign correspondents and breaking into the business of working outside your national media.



Here are some quick facts about Katerina Zachovalova:

•         - Katerina Zachovalova has reported for the English language service of Deutsche Presse
Agentur, known as DPA, a German news agency, since 2007. She is Czech, but fluent in English.

•        - She has freelanced for both Czech and English media for a decade.

•        - Her stories were published in Time Magazine and Time.com

•         - She contributed reporting to stories ran by The Economist and The New York Times.

•         - She earned a journalism degree from Columbia University in New York in 2003. She also
studied journalism and media studies at Charles University in Prague.



Here are some interesting things that she mentioned during the lecture:

•        - She became a journalist by accident, because a friend of her told her
she could write well and because her grandmother was a journalist.

•         - One of her professors helped her changed her attitude towards journalism.
In Columbia University she learned how to write stories. During the 90s, universities in Eastern
Europe only focused on lectures and theory and the students hardly wrote any stories.

•         - She started out as a fixer when she was a student and did some research for
The Economist, for journalists who covered Eastern Europe. This happened by accident,
because she met someone at somebody’s wedding.
- She has also been a fixer for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, etc.


•         - People didn’t tell her what they wanted. She had to tell them what to do and who
to talk to because they live in different countries.



Something that might come in handy if you want to work in an agency is to know
“a day in the life” of a journalist at DPA:

•        - Katerina Zachovalova wakes up at 9am. She reads the newspapers, checks the Czech
news agencies, the news channels, etc. That takes her between 10 and 30 minutes.

•        - She writes her editor based in Vienna and has a conference call at around 10:30
am to tell him/her what is going on and what stories she has come up with. She has to know what
is important and write stories about that.

•        - She goes to press conferences, interviews, etc.

•        -  Her stories are for the English service, so they do not have to be German oriented,
even if she works for DPA. She sends her news stories as soon as possible. Not everything gets
published.

•       -  During her spare time she focuses on features and fun stories that could turn out
pretty interesting.

•       - She thinks young journalists can learn simple and clear writing by working at an
agency, as well as good reporting. She highly recommends it.



If you want to contact her, her email address is
 katerina@czechjournalist.com



You can check most of her work at Time.com website