The Woman Who Fell from the Sky is a memoir about the author's tenure as editor in chief of the Yemen Observer newspaper in Sana'a, Yemen. Hilarious and insightful, it is a tale of personal growth as well as of the transformation of the newspaper and its Yemeni staff. In the spring of 2006, Steil was working as a senior editor of The Week, a national newsweekly based in New York, when her high-school sweetheart emailed to ask if she would come train a group of ambitious young journalists at the Yemen Observer, an independent, English-language newspaper located in the capital city of Sana’a.
Steil faced the multiple challenge of learning how to manage a newsroom, train her journalists, and navigate her way through an alien culture, all at once. Progress—hers, her reporters’, and the paper’s—was not linear. There were at least as many dramatic setbacks as there were improvements. But eventually, small miracles happened. Her reporters grasped the rudiments of journalism and began turning in better stories. She accomplished the unprecedented feat of wrestling the paper into a regular schedule. And she learned patience—not only with her reporters, but with the constant electrical outages, water shortages, lack of organization, and a culture that insisted on moving at its own pace. This was a country in which a typical excuse for missing work was: “I have to go pick up my machine gun so I can go to my village and defend my land.”
The Woman Who Fell From the Sky explores the power struggle between Steil and the male editor she replaced; the clash of western and Yemeni work ethics; the self-censorship they were forced to employ to keep the building from getting bombed; her friendship with a feisty female ace reporter; and the courtroom drama that unfolded after the Yemen Observer published the incendiary cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed.
www.jennifersteil.net