Part of the reason they employed me here is to improve journalistic standards at the paper. The CEO said to me when I arrived they put a lot of defamatory libellous stories in before. Stories are based on single sources, with little verification. He said he wanted to be more serious about this, improve the level of fact checking and balaning stories.
We have a story on hold at the moment about a business man in a northern Nigerian state who is going back on an agreement he made with the state government that he shoudl not attack the governor any more.
Last year the man signed a memorandum of understanding which said he would not issue any petitions or be involved in any legal action against the governor. He and his associates had been sueing the EFCC trying to get them to investigate the governor.
He says they paid him some money. He says he tried to pay the money back, because, he said if he flat refused the cash the government could have claimed he had taken it. If he took it and returned it, at least he could prove that he'd paid it back.
The trouble was his associates petitioned the EFCC about him, claming he'd taken N25 million and two plots of land. The people who got him to sign the agreement to leave the governor alone got hold of the petition, and forwarded it to the police.
They came up form Abuja, arrested the business man, and questioned him about the bribe. He was released. He resolved to start his campaign against the governor again, screw the agreement, they'd broken it by reporting him to the police for the bribe they gave him.

The story is riddled with incosistencies and one sided "facts". Our legal department has refused to pass the story and the reporter is getting more and more frustrated. There is talk that the CEO has links with the governor and is trying to stifle the story, but this is not entirely true. There was another story about the governor before, and the CEO just wanted some balance, apparently.

But we have three solid facts. There was an agreement, the man was arrested, and he has broken the agreement. I'm itching to publish the story, but the editor is being very cautious. People ask in the afternoon conference, "so the XXXX state story is done?" and the editor says "Kai! there are still problems with the legal side.""We're waiting on the documents to come".

I found myself on the side of people I had previously contradicted for being too reckless before.. using the same arguments ("what is the information commissioner going to say, IF we even get hold of him?" "Its a DAILY paper we should publish"). I phoned the information commissioner who refused to believe i worked for the paper, and even after speaking to the editor refused to make any comment or even listen to the accusations without seeng the documents.

Apparently the state government employees were really scared about us publishing the story, our reporter showed them the documents and the information commissioner said he wanted to see the story. we refused and so he said "no comment" which was predictable. But still we refuse to publish. Apparently the state civil servantsinvolved have started taking the mickey out of our reporter. They've started gloating.