For visionary editor, the world was his beat
Fleet Street veteran Ingram helped journalists across developing nations
Derek Ingram had the appearance of a stereotypical English gentleman — tall, posh-sounding, unfailingly courteous, and always slightly rumpled.
Hardly the image of a radical, futuristic thinker — which, in a low-key and determined manner, he most surely was.
He was also a legend among many Canadian journalists who, thanks to his vision, travelled the world as young reporters and developed a sense of the issues and challenges facing developing countries. Ingram died recently in London, just shy of his 93rd birthday.
Ingram, who also travelled he world, was deputy editor of the London-based Daily Mail — an influential position in British journalism — when he clashed with its owners over the newspaper’s colonial attitude, especially its coverage of South Africa during the apartheid era. A passionate human rights advocate, he loathed the racist South African regime, which at the time was wholeheartedly supported and defended by much of the British establishment.
After a 17-year career at the Mail, the two parted company and on Jan. 1, 1967, he and fellow journalist Oliver Carruthers launched Gemini News Service, an international reporting enterprise built on a desire to generate journalism from under-reported Third World countries (as the global South was then called), and sell that locally produced journalism to clients across the world. Ingram felt the perspective and knowledge of developing-nation journalists should be highlighted and shared more widely.
In the subsequent 35 years, Gemini gave worldwide exposure to dozens of journalists, most notably from developing Commonwealth countries. It paid them for their stories in a way that allowed many to sustain careers even in relatively poor countries. Many of today’s leading journalists across the developing world owe their start to Ingram.
Many Canadian journalists also praise him for their own early development. Gemini quickly forged a special relationship with Canada through a yearly IDRC fellowship that enabled young Canadian journalists to work at the tiny Gemini office in London before moving on to also report for it from developing countries. Canadian “Gemini fellows” reported from nations as diverse as India, Ethiopia, Botswana.
“A couple of dozen Canadian journalists had their eyes opened to the developing world through Gemini,” said former Toronto Star reporter Allan Thompson, now a Carleton University journalism professor. “For me, as a reporter, it was a fantastic experience.
“Gemini pioneered the concept of journalists living and working in the countries they were writing about, and the service was reasonably priced, so it gave midsize news outlets in the developing world a wire service written by their own journalists.”
The agency was also at the forefront of science and environmental reporting for and from developing nations.
Carruthers had been a “dilettante” journalist in the former Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) and funded the Gemini project with inherited money; Ingram was the journalistic driving force. Gemini was a trailblazer with an eventual network of more than 100 correspondents across the world. But as a business venture, it was on chronically shaky ground. Neither Ingram nor Carruthers had business brains.
“We had a newspaper client in Tanzania who didn’t pay our bill for seven years,” recalled Daniel Nelson, who succeeded Ingram as Gemini editor in 1993. “But Derek resisted cutting them off.
“Derek was tremendously loyal and liked the newspapers and journalists with whom we were dealing,” added Nelson. “He wasn’t simply making calculated commercial decisions. He always expected the best and most honourable outcomes from other people, so best to believe and trust people in the hope that they would deliver — which they generally did.”
Gemini teetered on the financial edge and at one point was taken over by the Guardian newspaper, then closed for a year in early 1982 before being resuscitated again in 1983 by the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) which re-modelled the agency as an educational trust focused on development journalism. It closed permanently in 2002.
Ingram was a fierce advocate for media freedom and passionate about the Commonwealth, an organization of which Canada is a key member; today it boasts 53 member countries and 2.4 billion people.
Ingram was key to creating the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative and at a 1978 conference at Dalhousie University, he formed the Commonwealth Journalists Association (CJA) with Canadian broadcaster Patrick Keatley and a group of other Commonwealth journalists.
The CJA provided journalism training across the developing world and created a network of local branches.
Ingram attended 20 Commonwealth summits and was considered a leading expert on the organization. Well into his 70s, he travelled the Commonwealth on behalf of the group’s Secretariat, gathering material for a report on how to enhance the organization and its image.
“He will be remembered for his friendliness, his support for younger journalists, and the hospitable way in which he threw open his mews house for guests and journalists passing through London,” said his friend, Richard Bourne. Until recently, Ingram was still involved in the CJA.
Although he never completed his promised autobiography, he did have a title for it: “There’s a Gecko In My Typewriter.”
It came from experience. He was once in Africa writing a story on a typewriter when a streak of blood appeared on the page. A gecko had caught itself in the carriage return and got squished.
A metaphor, he decided, for reporting in Africa.