With deep sadness we inform you that our dear colleague and friend, Lloyd Donaldson, died suddenly on 26 June 2010 (pictured top right). Lloyd was a Programme Director with MDI from 2001-2006, at a very important time for the organisation. Lloyd helped MDI expand its work to new regions such as the South Caucasus, Middle East and South East Asia. He also moved MDI’s work on to a new level – programmatically and strategically.
Lloyd was a wonderful man, who did so much not only for the journalism profession but, made all of us better, kinder and more tolerant just by being himself. He cared for those who needed care – not because it was his job, but because he chose the job in order to pursue that most important principle of his. One of MDI’s trainers, and his very close friend, Alistair Crighton, wrote the following ‘In Memoriam’ for Lloyd:
“Man lives consciously for himself, but is an unconscious instrument in the attainment of the historic, universal, aims of humanity.” Leo Tolstoy
Lloyd Donaldson taught me everything I needed to know about writing news in a half-mile walk from Pionerskaya metro station to the newspaper’s pre-launch offices: his cramped high-rise apartment in a scruffy suburb that resembled the council estate at the End of the World. Pyramids. Put the important info first, the least important last. Write in simple sentences. Make it easy on the subs; let them cut from the bottom, blindly. That’s it.
What Lloyd has taught me about journalism, rather than news writing, has taken a lifetime, and is a lesson that’s sadly incomplete. Lloyd was, ultimately, one of the great moralists and humanists, a man who saw journalism as a way of not only recording but fighting the injustices and moral failings all around us. And, in Russia in 1992, there were plenty of those. But he also had a deep understanding that his journalism was an ideal, always sway to the inevitable shortcomings of its practitioners. Like myself, he was an inveterate voyeur of the lower strata of Petersburg society; the mafiosi, the whores, the drunks, the punks and the crooks. But he banned escort ads in the St Petersburg Press, refusing a potentially lucrative income stream because that crossed a line. He resisted paying off the hoods who used to turn up at the early offices in the Komsomolets Hotel with monotonous regularity. He mocked the death threats by posting them on a noticeboard in the newsroom.
Lloyd’s addiction to danger and adrenalin is widely known. But I think, as a journalist, it bothered him — he was, essentially, a tourist, with a New Zealand passport to guarantee has path to safety; a luxury not afforded to those fixers and local reporters and photographers a foreign correspondent inevitably bonds with. I think that’s what drove him to become an active, rather than passive, participant; by helping to rebuild homes and lives in those countries he loved he put his Karmic ledger firmly in the black.
In a world where conformity is becoming ever more the norm, Lloyd’s sheer individuality will be sorely missed. Just a few examples, from those early years in St Petersburg. A teetotal vegan in Russia in the early 90s? A man in his late 20s with facial hair last seen in the late Victorian period? A hippy with a line in three-piece Christian Dior suits? A pioneering businessman in one of the world’s great cultural capitals, who was never happier than when slumming it in the smoke-ravaged interior of the tAM tAM club?
Everyone who knew Lloyd will have their own examples to add to that brief list, and from any point in his life.
Since working with Lloyd in the 1990s, and later, far too briefly, at the Media Diversity Institute, I have long searched for a mentor or even colleague of similar outlook. Someone with the same blend of fearsome intelligence, superhuman drive and freeze-dried, jet black wit and humour. I never did; instead I hoped one day our working lives would cross again. Now they never will, I can only build on those lessons I learned from Lloyd, the first one on that cold morning in Petersburg and many others in the 18 years that followed, and embrace the fact that his life made my life, and the lives of countless others, a richer, more interesting place.
Alistair Crighton. Dubai, 2010.