When Martin is on safari the only news he gets is delivered in paw prints, dung droppings and from vultures buzzing overhead that tell him what animals passed through the night before, what animals may still be lurking, and which lost battles with their predators.

“That is my newspaper when I am in the bush,” he told us. He had been sharing that news with us for the last two days in South Luangwa Park where he was our guide. Over lunch he also gave us his take on politics, corruption and economy in Zambia , which newspaper is the most entertaining, which is the most credible. That kind of news was important to him too, but harder to come by since the cell phone that delivered headline bulletins to him dropped in the river when he was pointing out a crocodile some months ago.

Now he gathers what he can from colleagues who have more time to spend on the slow Internet there, from the radio in the evening, and, until it closed recently, from a store near the airport that stocked newspapers that he grabbed when he dropped off lodge visitors. When he is not on safari he has a satellite dish attached to his home in a nearby village where he watches ZNBC.

News is important to him, perhaps all the more so, because he has to work to get it.

When he does get it, it tends to be the stories that get big play – international news and national politics. The other stuff is unlikely to make the front page, the internet headline, the word of mouth circuit.

But he knows some of the other stuff, because it is in front of him. He knows that the HIV rates are high here, where tourism brings money , and he mentions that connection. He knows that the school he attended as a boy now has a 100 to 1 student/teacher ratio, because housing for them is scarce, along with supplies and health care.

These scraps of information get covered in the media too, but off the front page where they would grab the attention of others, like him, gathering their information on the run. He knows it anyway, but you have to wonder how much of it otherwise disappears, unnoted, like animal tracks.

Back home we used to angle to get stories on the front page, just for the better play and few more inches it would give us for those details that we felt made our prose priceless. Here, and increasingly everywhere, the difference between headlines and buried stories is the difference between news and droppings.