International News Reporting E-Book

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 507

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

A collection of essays by top international correspondants in print, broadcasting, and photojournalism, International News Reporting offers an introduction to journalism written by the people who have made the profession what it is today.

• Contributors identify the major areas of professional practice which students and young journalists need to know in order to work safely in, and understand fully, the field of international news gathering
• Looks at events from conflicts to humanitarian disasters
• Covers crucial topics such as how to report stories about the developing world, how to avoid stereotyping, the uses and abuses of blogging, and risk assessment for journalists in conflict zones

Leseprobe

Contents

Notes on Contributors

Preface

Acknowledgements

1 Bearing WitnessJanine di Giovanni

Note

References

2 The Future of News Services and International ReportingDavid Schlesinger

Notes

References

3 Technology, Timeliness and Taste: The Battlefronts for the Twenty-First Century News AgencyNigel Baker

Timeliness and the Video Factor

Technology and Taste

Technology and Copyright

Conclusion

References

4 Freelance JournalismVaughan Smith

What is Freelance Journalism?

Winston Churchill

Magnum Photos

Photojournalism Today

Frontline News Television

Technology

Freelance Journalism Today

Note

References

5 Letter to a Young PhotographerGary Knight

Objectivity versus Having a Point of View

Amateur Photography in the Media

Ethics

Explicit Images

Herds and Instinct

Safety

The Boring (but Important) Business of Photography

Stories

Beyond the Media

Equipment

Notes

6 Diplomacy and JournalismBridget Kendall

Journalistic Challenges

Why Diplomatic Reporting will Endure

7 Non-Stop Deadlines: 24-Hour NewsNick Pollard

8 World Perspectives: Ignoring the World at our PerilTony Burman

Lessons from Abroad

Turning the World Off

Turning the World Back On

In Whose Interests?

Notes

References

9 Local HeroesAnthony Borden

Independent Voices in the Balkans

Electronic Samizdat

Everyone’s a Blogger

Mess in Mesopotamia

Think Global, Act Local

Notes

References

10 Taking the Right RiskChris Cramer

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

Media in Iraq

Armed Security

Conclusion

Appendix: Surviving the Story – Staying Safe in a Hostile World

References

Acknowledgements

11 Emotions, Trauma and Good JournalismMark Brayne

Why Do I Need to Know about Trauma?

What is Trauma?

Reporting Trauma: The Journalism

Getting the Story

Interviewing

So, What Is the Story?

Writing the Story

Reporting Trauma: The Journalist

Tips for Dealing with Potentially Traumatic Events

The Management of Trauma: Before, During and After

So, What Should I Watch Out For?

What if Someone Is Hurting?

And Finally

Note

References

Recommended Further Reading

Online Resources

12 Citizen JournalismRichard Sambrook

Note

References

13 Working at the Coalface of New MediaBen Hammersley

Note

References

14 Reporting Humanitarian CrisesPeter Apps

Initial Reports

Writing the Story

Feature Writing

Working with Aid Agencies

Getting On the Ground

Covering Conflict

Money Counts

The Bigger Picture

Note

Useful Links

Index

John Owen is professor of international journalism at City University in London and has played a leading role in international journalism for the past 30 years. He spent 20 years with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) and held all of its senior television news positions, including five years as its chief news editor. He left the CBC to become the founding director of the European Centre of the Freedom Forum in London, and is also the founding executive producer of News Xchange, the largest international broadcast conference group underwritten by the European Broadcasting Union. John is the founding chairman of the Frontline Club Forum in London, is a newly appointed trustee of the Open Society Foundation and a trustee of the Crimes of War Project, and is a founding editorial board member of the International News Safety Institute. He is co-author with Chris Cramer of Dying To Tell the Story.

Heather Purdey is a senior lecturer in the Department of Journalism and Publishing at City University in London, director of the MA International Journalism course and internationalization coordinator for the School of Arts. She has been a journalist since 1976 and has worked in newspapers, radio and television. She was the director of training for GWR, one of the largest commercial radio companies in the UK, and set up the first vocational undergraduate programme in broadcast journalism in the UK. Heather has worked as a consultant in Eastern Europe, designed training programmes for Slovakia and Kenya, and published about journalism education and training in journals and books. Her Master of Philosophy looked at the training needs of journalists and she is the vice-chair of the Broadcast Journalism Training Council, the industry body which accredits broadcast journalism courses in the UK.

The Kurt Schork Memorial Fund

All royalty earnings generated by the sale of this book will be donated to the Kurt Schork Memorial Fund (http://www.ksmfund.org), which was created in honour of Kurt Schork, a highly admired and respected international journalist, killed while on assignment in Sierra Leone in May 2000. The picture below shows Schork in Sarajevo coming to the rescue of a civilian who’d become a casualty. Photo courtesy of Associated Press/photographer Javier Bauluz.

The fund underwrites annual awards to outstanding freelance and local journalists. Applications can be made through the IWPR website: http://www.iwpr.net/index.php?apc_state=henh&s=o&o=top_ksa.html.

This edition first published 2009

© 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd except for chapters 1 (© 2009 Janine di Giovanni), 9 (© 2009 Anthony Borden), and 11 (© 2009 Mark Brayne)

Blackwell Publishing was acquired by John Wiley & Sons in February 2007. Blackwell’s publishing program has been merged with Wiley’s global Scientific, Technical, and Medical business to form Wiley-Blackwell.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

International news reporting: frontlines and deadlines/edited by John Owen and Heather Purdey.

P. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4051-6038-4 (hardcover: alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4051-6039-1 (pbk.: alk. paper)

1. Foreign news. 2. Reporters and reporting. I. Owen, John, 1942–. II. Purdey, Heather.

PN4784.F61587 2009

070.4'332—dc22

2008040260

Notes on Contributors

Peter Apps joined Reuters in 2003 and has worked throughout Southern Africa and Sri Lanka. After breaking his neck in a minibus crash while on assignment in Sri Lanka in 2006, he returned to work at Reuters nine months later, assigned to the Reuters Foundation website AlertNet. He is currently working on Reuters main news wire desk in London covering emerging markets and economics.

Nigel Baker is executive director of television news at Associated Press. Prior to helping set up the agency’s video wing in 1994, he held senior editorial positions at British broadcasters ITN and Sky News and at Reuters. Field assignments have included the first Gulf War in Iraq, the fall of communism in the Soviet Union, and the break-up of Yugoslavia. In his current role, he negotiated with the North Korean government for the opening in 2006 of the first bureau for a Western news organization in the reclusive communist state.

Anthony Borden is executive director of the Institute for War & Peace Reporting (IWPR), which supports training, reporting and institution-building programmes for local journalists in areas of crisis and conflict around the world. IWPR has established the Sahar Journalists’ Assistance Fund, to provide support in cases of exile, disability or death of local journalists it works with in crisis areas; for information on how to contribute, see www.iwpr.net.

Mark Brayne is a psychotherapist and trainer specializing in trauma and journalism, having served for 30 years as foreign correspondent and senior editor for Reuters and the BBC World Service. He developed and implemented for the BBC a programme of trauma awareness and support training in which he has also trained journalists, editors and managers at news organizations around the world. From 2002 to 2007, he served as director Europe of the US-based Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma, working with journalists, mental health professionals and educators towards imp roving media coverage of violence and trauma, and mitigating the emotional consequences of such coverage on those who report the stories.

Tony Burman has been the managing director of Al Jazeera English since May 2008. At the time of writing his chapter, he was the editor-in-chief and executive director of CBC News. While head of CBC’s news and current affairs operations, he implemented the successful integration of its radio, TV and online operations. He is an award-winning news and documentary producer with field experience in more than 30 countries and several continents.

Chris Cramer was formerly the president and managing director of CNN International and is now a global media consultant. He is the honorary president of the International News Safety Institute. He is also co-author (with John Owen) of Dying To Tell the Story.

Ben Hammersley is a print and broadcast journalist who has been one of the leading proponents of new media journalism. He is associate editor of the UK edition of Wired magazine. His freelance work includes regular contributions to the BBC and MSN/UK.

Janine di Giovanni is an award-winning war correspondent who has been covering global conflicts since the 1980s. She is a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and a columnist and essayist for many publications, including the Guardian, the Evening Standard and the New York Times. She is also the author of four books, the last a book of essays, The Place at the End of theWorld. Her book on the Balkans War, Madness Visible, has been optioned for a feature film by Julia Roberts.

Bridget Kendall has been the BBC’s diplomatic correspondent since 1998 and a winner of the James Cameron award for distinguished journalism. She was based for a number of years in Moscow and is a Russian-language speaker.

Gary Knight is an award-winning photojournalist, primarily concerned with human rights and issues of crimes and justice. He has written widely on photography and journalism. Knight is a founding member of the VII photojournalism agency. He is also the co-editor of a new quarterly publication, Dispatches.

Nick Pollard has been a journalist for almost 40 years, working in print, radio and television news. For 10 years until 2006 he was head of Sky News at BSkyB. Under his leadership, Sky News became the most watched 24-hour news channel in Britain and won numerous awards for its coverage of major stories. He is a fellow of the Royal Television Society and was awarded the RTS’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2007.

Richard Sambrook is director of the BBC’s Global News division, responsible for leading the BBC’s international news services across radio, television and new media.

David Schlesinger has been editor-in-chief of Reuters since January 2007. He was previously the global managing editor of Reuters. He has been a correspondent and run editorial operations for Reuters in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Vaughan Smith is an award-winning freelance cameraman and video news journalist who has covered conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Bosnia, Chechnya and Kosovo. He helped found the Frontline News Television agency, which he ran for many years, and is the owner and founder of the Londonbased Frontline Club and Restaurant. He was a joint winner of the MediaGuardian Innovation Award in 2008 for his independent blog while on assignment in Afghanistan. He is the co-producer of a new film, BloodTrail, that will be screened at the Toronto Film Festival.

Preface

John Owen

For the past six years, I have had the privilege of teaching a course in international journalism to postgraduate and undergraduate students at City University in London. It is a course created by the former Reuters correspondent Colin Bickler, who kindly asked if I was interested in taking over his class, as he had decided to cut back on his teaching load. I said yes without fully understanding or appreciating the challenge that I was facing.

It meant trying to devise a course that could prove both interesting and relevant to upwards of 70 students who came from more than 30 countries in all of the continents. Thanks to Colin and Heather Purdey and other highly dedicated professors, City had established an excellent international reputation for attracting outstanding young developing journalists who were already working for leading newspapers and broadcasters in their home countries. Many chose City and London because it is the world’s global media headquarters, and they dreamt of working someday for the BBC World Service or one of the top British newspapers. They realized that City and London would help them master English, a key to future employment. Others simply hoped to get the academic credentials that they needed to return home to their own news organizations and the prospect of more senior positions.

Throughout my years of teaching at City, I have found it humbling to be in the company of so many wonderful young journalists, many of whom had already demonstrated courage and resourcefulness working in countries without a truly free and independent press or a culture of free expression. One of my students, Sandra Nyaira, had been the political editor of the Zimbabwe Daily News and had won the 2004 International Women’s Media Foundation award for courage in journalism. Her newspaper had been firebombed, and she and many of her fellow journalists had narrowly escaped being killed. Another student, Iraqi Shadha Muheissn, had been the BBC’s reporter in Baghdad, and this year received the Knight International Journalism Award for service to international journalism.

In the 2007–8 class, one of our students is Salam Abdulmunem, a onetime architecture student in Baghdad who in the war in Iraq became known throughout the world as Salam Pax, the Baghdad Blogger. (Richard Sambrook writes about him in his chapter on citizen journalism.)

I had decided that my international journalism class would be of most value to this highly diverse and ambitious group if I could succeed in doing the following.

Make the class relentlessly relevant to understanding and working in a global world of journalism and media that was undergoing dramatic change.Introduce the students to the best and most respected professional journalists, who were also self-critical and humble about their work, and could serve as role models for them.Provoke reflection on ethical journalistic issues that would confront them in their journalistic lives. I’ve always told my students that if in their journalistic moments of crisis, they remembered a conversation or insight about what was the right thing that they should do, then I’d consider that my course had proven valuable to them.Gain insights from analysing the coverage of major international news stories that took place while they were studying at City, hearing from British-based editors who assigned them and the reporters who covered them, and reviewing their own media’s comparative coverage.Make certain that they understand fully what technological and new media challenges face them – from multi-skilling to blogging to user-generated content.Ensure that these young journalists understood all aspects of safety in journalism and what they needed to know in order to take the right risks in pursuing stories that were potentially dangerous, whether covering conflicts or natural disasters, or pursuing local investigative stories where they were at the greatest risk.Provide them with awareness of the new body of journalistic literature about trauma and journalism; how their own impartiality and detachment can be influenced by their exposure to troubling and disturbing stories; how in understanding better those they’re covering, they might find new skills in how to gain information and the trust of their sources.

In deciding what chapters should be included in International News Reporting and then approaching outstanding journalists to write about them, we had to try and identify those issues and subjects that are fundamental to journalism around the world and essential to grasp in order to be better practitioners, whether in daily journalism or some other mediarelated career.

It was difficult to narrow the choice to these 14 subjects because there are so many other issues that lend themselves to greater scrutiny. We’ve had to leave out of this first edition the stories and reflections of journalists who’ve contributed to our classes, sharing their experiences and exposing themselves to hard questions about how they handled certain assignments.

We are indeed fortunate that so many illustrious journalists who are heading or have headed the most influential broadcast news organizations in the world have agreed to contribute to this book. They did so knowing that they would receive no money for their efforts and be forced to give up what little free time they have to organize their thoughts and write 6,000 words. Many are old friends and colleagues and could easily have told me that there was no way that they could take on any additional commitments. But they did take it on and proved once again that it is those with the biggest and most demanding jobs that somehow find the energy to tackle projects like this one. I am deeply grateful to each of them: Chris Cramer (formerly with CNN), Richard Sambrook (BBC Global News), Nick Pollard (formerly with Sky News), David Schlesinger (Reuters) and Anthony Borden (IWPR).

Also, International News Reporting changed emphasis along the way, and we decided later to add additional chapters. Again, we were so impressed by how exceptionally busy news executives like Nigel Baker (APTN), Tony Burman (formerly CBC) and – very close to the deadline Peter Apps (Reuters) accepted the last-minute challenge and crafted excellent chapters.

We are equally indebted to our ‘field journalists’ and other experts for their generous support of this book. Not only did Janine di Giovanni (Vanity Fair), Gary Knight (VII), Vaughan Smith (freelance and Frontline), Bridget Kendall (BBC), Ben Hammersley (BBC) and Mark Brayne (ex-Reuters and Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma) waive any fee for their contributions, they found time beyond their deadlines and assignments to discuss their craft and share their experiences. They have in effect given the student readers of this book a master class in journalism.

It is our hope that tomorrow’s journalists, whether they work inside newsrooms or in the field, or aspire to become news executives, will find this book both insightful and provocative; that they will put into practice what they’ve absorbed from these outstanding journalists.

As we neared our deadline for this book, I stumbled onto a profound little book, Liberty and the News, by the great American journalist and man of letters Walter Lippmann. Writing in 1920 when he was only 31 years old, Lippmann despaired at the poor quality of American journalism. He urged the creation of journalism schools that helped turn journalism from a ‘haphazard trade into a disciplined profession’.

Lippmann said what was needed was:

to send out into reporting a generation of men who will by their sheer superiority, drive the incompetents out of business. It means two things. It means a public recognition of the dignity of such a career so that it will cease to be the refuge of the vaguely talented. With this increase of prestige must go a professional training in journalism in which the ideal of objective testimony is cardinal. The cynicism of the trade needs to be abandoned, for the true patterns of the journalistic apprentice are not the slick persons who scoop the news, but the patient and fearless men of science who have laboured to see what the world really is. (Lippmann 2008: 48)

In that spirit, we hope that International News Reporting: Frontlines andDeadlines helps to inspire a new generation of young journalists to bear witness to the world as it really is. In doing so, they will keep faith with brave journalists everywhere who believe what they do does matter to a free and democratic society.

City University’s MA in International Journalism

Heather Purdey

City University’s Master’s course in international journalism has been educating and training journalists from all over the world for more than 25 years.

Up to 80 students from 30 different countries attend each year for a practical course which not only teaches them the skills they need to have to work as reporters in print, radio, television and online, but also gives them the opportunity to reflect on some of the issues which are affecting the practice of international journalism today. City’s multi-national, multicultural, multi-religious, multi-ethnic student mix reflects the complex, globalized society in which we all now live and encourages an exchange of views and perspectives which broadens their and our minds, and widens horizons.

We want to turn out journalists who are not only highly skilled but thoughtful and critically aware of the major issues faced in international reporting today.

This book complements our teaching. Each chapter, all of which have been written by prominent and experienced journalists, looks at a specific aspect of journalism, from ‘bearing witness’ to reporting diplomacy; from breaking news stories to the effect of new technology on the work of the international news agencies. Introductions set the context, and at the end of each chapter there are suggested questions for students to work through, either by themselves or under the guidance of their professors. The topics addressed by the contributors, the questions they raise, the practical problems they pose, all affect journalists covering international stories, and newsmen and women today need to consider them if they are to succeed and survive.

We hope lecturers and students alike will find this book a useful tool. It is dedicated to those brave freelance journalists who risk their lives to report the world so that we can understand it better.

Reference

Lippmann, W. (2008) Liberty and the News. Princeton University Press.

Acknowledgements

The editors would like to thank the following for their help in compiling this book: all the contributors (in order of chapters): Janine di Giovanni, David Schlesinger, Nigel Baker, Vaughan Smith, Gary Knight, Bridget Kendall, Nick Pollard, Tony Burman, Anthony Borden, Chris Cramer, Mark Brayne, Richard Sambrook, Ben Hammersley and Peter Apps; Susan Moeller, whose thoughts and publications have been invaluable to the editors; the Pew Research Center, AP and PQ Media for permission to use their graphs; Baywood Publishing Company for permission to reproduce part of the chapter on risk and safety; photo editor Kavita Sharma, for her help in tracking down and getting permissions for the photographs; City University, particularly the head of journalism and publishing Adrian Monck and the tutors on the international journalism programme, and all the students on the international journalism course who have inspired this book.

This book is dedicated to David Purdey, who has been an indispensable source of support, and the memory of Richard D. Yoakam, professor of journalism at Indiana University.

The authors and publisher wish to thank the following for permission to use photographs and video stills:

p. ii: Photo courtesy of Associated Press/Photographer Javier Bauluz

p. 3: Photo courtesy of Associated Press/Photographer Gemunu Amarasinge

p. 4: Photo courtesy of Magnum Photos/Photographer Alex Majoli

p. 18: Photo courtesy of Associated Press/Photographer Santiago Lyon

pp. 27–8: Photos courtesy of Thomson Reuters

p. 42: Photo courtesy of Associated Press/Photographer Lauren Rebours

pp. 50–1: Photos courtesy of Associated Press

pp. 57 and 67: Photos and video still courtesy of Vaughan Smith

p. 73: Photo courtesy of Associated Press/Photographer Nick Ut

p. 74: Photo courtesy of Associated Press/Photographer Richard Drew

p. 76: Photo courtesy of Sean Smith

pp. 79–80: Photos courtesy of Gary Knight

p. 97: Photo courtesy of Associated Press

p. 119: Photo courtesy of Sky News

p. 129: Photo courtesy of CBC News

pp. 154–5 and 159: Photos courtesy of IWPR

p. 164: Photo courtesy of Associated Press/Photographer Khalid Mohammed

p. 165: Photo courtesy of Thomson Reuters/Photographer Sergei Karpukhin

p. 168: Photo courtesy of CBC News

p. 205: Video stills courtesy of BBC News

p. 228: Photo courtesy of Michael Hughes

p. 245: Photo courtesy of Ben Hammersley

pp. 255 and 257: Photos courtesy of Thomson Reuters

The publisher apologizes for any errors or omissions in the above list and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.

1

Bearing Witness

Janine di Giovanni

Introduction

JOHN OWEN

At the core of this book is the belief that first-person reporting is fundamental to international journalism.

The late David Halberstam, who established his journalistic reputation in Vietnam in the early 1960s with his tough-minded reporting for the New York Times, wrote in the Associated Press’s tribute to its journalists, Breaking News: How the Associated Press has Covered War, Peace,and Everything Else (2007: 16):

[To me] that is what journalism is all about, sending good reporters to difficult and dangerous places that are about to become important but are not yet household words, covering stories when coverage means something, not, as all too often happens these days, too late in the story, when it doesn’t really matter any more …. They [journalists] come to a story a little late and then leave a little too early.

We live in a global media world that can, when it chooses, have the capacity to link us all with dazzling technology – the Al Gore Live Earth global rock concert in July 2007 springs to mind – and has the capacity to influence us to care about developments anywhere on the planet.

Yet all that technology is seldom used to enlighten us about what is happening around the world, especially in Africa (Darfur is our most recent shameful example). The more than 100 networks that own and operate 24-hour news channels don’t make international news a high priority with the exception of huge breaking news stories like 9/11, the London bombings, the death of Diana, the invasion of Iraq and the tsunami.

There are notable exceptions, and internationally minded networks such as BBC, CNN (I refer to the English-language channels that I can see and understand), Sky News and the new Al Jazeera English-language channel do often commit huge resources to support dedicated news teams to take substantial risks to get to conflict zones and areas where natural disasters are occurring.

Yet few working in mainstream media today are proud of the international news output of their own newspapers or networks. It often falls to NGOs (the non-governmental organizations such as Human Rights Watch, the International Crisis Group and the World Food Programme) to chronicle stories and issues that are not on the radar of the mainstream news media.

But no website, however worthy and informative, or no packaged report, slickly produced in London or New York, will ever be able to surpass the impact of original journalism, the discoveries of a single reporter or documentary maker or photojournalist on assignment somewhere in the world.

For those of us who have worked alongside brilliant correspondents and camera crews and witnessed for ourselves the reality of dramatic stories and major news events, there remains a reverence for those who take the risks to cover the world. Their contributions – their ‘rough drafts of history’ – are valued by leading historians, are digested by our most insightful policy makers, and do provide a reality check for politicians and office holders who understand that men and women with cameras and notebooks are an indispensable part of democratic societies; that what they write, record and broadcast cannot be ignored even when the reading and viewing is at odds with the official line.

Pontificating so-called experts on 24-hour news channels cannot ever replace or should never replace the reporting that is only possible if men and women continue to be assigned or, in the case of freelancers, independently pursue the stories that give us – in renowned investigative reporter Bob Woodward’s definition – ‘the best obtainable version of the truth’.

There is a terrible price paid by those who are prepared to ‘take the torch to the back of the cave and show what is there in the darkness’ (that magnificent and moving phrase of American journalist and writer Pete Hamill from his wise little book News is a Verb (1998)).

Sunday Times correspondent Marie Colvin, blinded in one eye and badly wounded, reporting on the Sri Lankan civil war in April 2001PHOTO COURTESY OF ASSOCIATED PRESS/PHOTOGRAPHER GEMUNU AMARASINGE

A thousand journalists lost their lives covering the news between 1996 and 2006 according to the International News Safety Institute’s 2007 study Killing the Messenger. The overwhelming numbers of journalists who die are local journalists who are murdered for trying to pursue stories that governments and authorities do not want published or broadcast. The killers of journalists are seldom, almost never, arrested and prosecuted.

This book begins with one outstanding reporter’s tale of her own life of reporting and ‘bearing witness’. Before we consider the major trends and issues facing journalism and media today and tomorrow, we first want to examine the role and responsibility of the reporter herself.

Janine di Giovanni is an expatriate American correspondent who filed dispatches from the frontlines of wars and conflicts that took place after the Berlin Wall came down in 1989. She and many other outstanding reporters of her generation chronicled the wars fought in the Balkans, first in Bosnia and then in Kosovo; the Intifada in Palestine; the Russian battle against the breakaway Chechens; and the civil wars in Africa. She also covered Afghanistan, East Timor and Iraq.

Janine di Giovanni’s many highly dangerous assignments – she was one of the few correspondents to watch the Russians pulverize Grozny, the capital of Chechnya – resulted in award-winning reports for the Times of London and Vanity Fair Magazine.

References

Associated Press (2007) Breaking News: How the Associated Press has Covered War, Peace, and Everything Else. Princeton Architectural Press.

Hamill, P. (1998) News is a Verb: Journalism at the End of the Twentieth Century. Ballantine.

International News Safety Institute (2007) Killing the Messenger: Report of the GlobalInquiry by the International News Safety Institute into the Protection of Journalists. INSI.

Bearing witness: Janine di Giovanni with a KLA soldier, reporting during the Kosovo war in 1999PHOTO COURTESY OF MAGNUM PHOTOS/PHOTOGRAPHER ALEX MAJOLI

On the morning of September 19, 2002, in a deserted cattle market in Abidjan, the capital of the Ivory Coast, at a time I should have been drinking my first cup of tea, a government soldier stood a foot away from me with an automatic weapon pointed at my heart.

There had been a coup d’etat but neither the soldier nor I knew that yet. All I knew was that I had gone to bed in a calm city – known as a beacon of stability in an otherwise violent West Africa – and woken up to gunfire; in other words, exactly what I had moved to Abidjan to escape: a war.

The confrontation in the cattle market was the aftermath of a short, sporadic battle between the government forces and some mysterious rebels no one had yet seen. Like me, the soldier was confused. He didn’t know who was launching the coup, or why. He had probably been dragged out of bed at dawn by a superior. He was probably scared and a little drunk from drinking bad gin the night before. He stood, soaked in sweat, boots too tight, pointing an AK-47 at me and looking as if he had every intention of using it.

I wasn’t alone. There was a man near my foot, groaning in pain. There were smears of blood on his clothes and the bullet wounds in his legs were small and neat. A moment before I’d squatted on the dirt and tried to drag him into my taxi. I wanted to get him to a hospital.

Hence, a government soldier threatening to shoot me.

‘He’s a rebel, he no good’, he said in thick Ivorian French.

‘He’s hurt, I’m taking him to the hospital’, I said.

He raised his gun, which had the safety catch off.

‘Leave him’, he said. ‘He’s ours.’

By the time this incident occurred, I had been reporting from war zones for nearly 15 years. I should have known that you don’t argue with a man with a gun – particularly one who has just shot someone. The sensible thing would be to realize I had wandered into the wrong place at the wrong time – before an execution was about to take place – back up, apologize, and run. But the same 15 years had also given me the over-confidence of the survivor. I knew what would happen if I left. The injured man, who was grabbing my ankle, pleading, ‘Sister, help me!’, would be shot and tossed into a grave or left with the dead cows to rot, which in tropical Africa can happen quickly. I had never seen this man before, but I knew what his body would look like by lunchtime.

So I argued badly – telling this soldier, who probably could not read and write, about the Geneva Convention, the rights of man, and Christian compassion. His impatience was turning to rage when another journalist pulled me back into our taxi and said: ‘This is Africa, what the hell were you thinking?’ Then we drove off. I don’t know how long it was before they killed that man, but I do know it was my luck or what the Arabs call Maktoub – ‘it is written’ – that got me out of bed at 4 a.m. and to the cattle market. It was also luck that someone was there – someone who later became my husband, as it happens – to save me from my dangerous compassion. Bad luck followed by good luck. I was lucky not to be shot. Several colleagues and friends had been killed taking much lower risks.

Two years earlier, in another part of West Africa, I ate my last meal with one of them, Kurt Schork. We went to the best restaurant in Freetown, Sierra Leone, and had grilled prawns. Schork was a 52-yearold Reuters correspondent who had been a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford with Bill Clinton. He was legendary for his bravado and his scalding humour. During our Christmas season in Sarajevo, then besieged by the Serbs, we’d attended a midnight mass and then drunk a bottle of black-market champagne as we listened to mortars falling on the snowy city.

Now, drinking beer in the Freetown restaurant, I told him about a group of stoned teenage soldiers called the West Side Boys that I’d encountered earlier in the day. They’d surrounded my car, punched the hood, aimed their RPGs in my face, and demanded money, cigarettes, marijuana and sex. While my driver cried with fear, a colleague in the same car shouted at him to drive through the crowd. ‘Just run them down!’

‘Total amateurs’, Schork said of the West Side Boys. ‘They sound like a pick-up basketball team.’

The next morning, I sat eating breakfast with another journalist I’d known in Bosnia, Miguel Gil Moreno, by the slime-green pool of our decrepit hotel. It was the end of the rainy season in West Africa, and as we ate we could see dozens of frogs procreating by the edge of the water.

Like Schork, Miguel had a reputation. He was devoutly religious as well as courageous. In 1999, we had shared a frontline base camp with rebel Kosovar soldiers when it was being aerially bombarded and we hid in trenches for days. He was the first person I phoned for advice before I went to Chechnya. ‘Remember to try to leave at least a week before the shelling drives you insane’, he said.

Over breakfast, Miguel asked me about a homemade video I’d been given which showed men who might have been UN soldiers being tortured by rebels in Sierra Leone. It should have been a warning to both of us – look; this is the madness that happens here. But instead we said goodbye and Miguel followed Kurt and his crew up the road towards Rogbury Junction, to find out if the video was real. By lunchtime both men were dead, ambushed and killed by teenagers. War, as Thucydides remarked when reporting on the Peloponnesian wars in the fifth century bc, is a violent teacher. As a reporter covering wars, you can learn a few lessons in staying alive from the mistakes of others, but no amount of judgement and caution can save you from bad luck.

What does it do to you? I once, on a rainy London afternoon, sat on the couch of a well-known psychiatrist who was evaluating the impact on journalists of post-traumatic stress disorder. It was to be a three-year study, and I was one of his early subjects. He asked me about my sleep habits, whether I drank or took drugs, whether I was sexually promiscuous. Then he asked:

‘How many dead bodies have you seen?’

I thought hard, trying to remember events and places; fields of bodies, mass graves, wells with blue corpses stuffed down them, the man in East Timor who washed up in the sewer, the slabs of dead flesh on my daily trips to the morgue in Sarajevo, the soldier in the snow in Chechnya, the miles and miles of dead Rwandans on a road near Goma.

‘I don’t know; hundreds?’ I thought again. ‘I have no idea.’

The psychiatrist was silent as he wrote in his notebook. After a while, he looked up.

‘Don’t you find that odd?’ he said, not unkindly. ‘Most people only see their grandparents, or their parents, at their funerals.’

Other than my grandmother’s, my first dead body was in Bosnia. I arrived in the early autumn of 1992. It was still warm enough to get stung by a wasp, the last balmy days before a brutal winter. The war that would ruin the country was still young and enthusiastic, rather like me. I wasn’t a complete ingénue about conflict – I’d been tear gassed in the crowd during Israeli–Palestinian clashes – but Bosnia was my first war zone.

Before that, I had been a rather haphazard academic trying to discover whether or not Katherine Mansfield had plagiarized Chekhov in her early short stories. But I grew claustrophobic in libraries, I was impatient with Mansfield’s lukewarm feminism, and I did not have the real drive to see it through. I threw away my PhD thesis in the late 1980s after I met an Israeli human rights lawyer who defended Palestinians. She led me throughout the West Bank and Gaza, introduced me to politicians and activists, and advised me to dedicate my life to writing about people who would otherwise be voiceless.

By then, I was working for the Sunday Times, and I fought to be sent to Bosnia – my editors kept trying to get me to write about style – but I eventually won the battle, and once in Bosnia, simply refused to leave. I stayed, on and off, for nearly three years.

That first trip, I travelled with a nervous Australian photographer and a young Croatian interpreter down small roads that had been commandeered by various rag-tag militias. Vesna, the interpreter, gave a potted history of the former Yugoslavia and smoked all my cigarettes. We passed empty villages with shuttered houses and fields of dead animals. There were no people on the road. Through the car window came the smell of distant explosives and petrol and fire. Near Vitez, we passed empty munitions factories which Vesna said had been part of a major industry during the Tito years.

A ghostly bus full of young soldiers, faces pressed against the windows, drove past with a sign hung on the side: VOLUNTEERS FOR JAJCE. Jajce, the ancient Bosnian capital, was now the scene of a bloody battle raging in the north that would soon be lost by Bosnian forces with many casualties. Vesna waved to one soldier; he waved back. She said: ‘He will never come back from Jajce.’

There was another photographer in the car behind us. He was French and silent. Sometimes, I drove with him. He was known to be fearless and somewhat strange, almost mystical. Once, on a particularly spooky road, we came to a Bosnian checkpoint and I lowered my window to hand the soldier our passports. The soldier reached out, but instead of taking the passports, he stared hard at the photographer’s pale face.

‘What strange eyes you have, my friend’, he said flatly.

The photographer frowned. ‘Strange?’ he asked. ‘What do you mean, strange?’

The soldier laughed, enjoying his discomfort. ‘You have death in your eyes’, he said matter-of-factly. He handed back our passports, lit a cigarette and lifted the frayed rope that was the checkpoint. He motioned us through, not talking, not smiling, not waving.

The photographer was silent for the rest of the trip until we reached the car wreck. Then we saw the real dead, two of them, a couple who had been trying to flee something – fighting, a village being burnt, none of us would know. Vesna had studied some medicine and she said they could only have been dead a few hours. Long enough, I remember thinking, for their souls to fly away.

They had driven into a tree at what must have been full speed, and they had flown through the windscreen so that their bodies lay half in, half out of the car. Their necks were broken and hung down like chicken gizzards. Their eyes were still open. Their bodies fascinated me. I walked closer and stared, trying to memorize their surprised expression, caught in the exact moment of death.

Why and to what private or public benefit? I don’t know, but in more than 10 years – and the 1990s was a decade of wars – I followed armed conflicts like a homing pigeon: the former Yugoslavia, then Chechnya, Somalia, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Algeria, Palestine, East Timor, Kosovo, Ivory Coast, and later Iraq and Afghanistan. I got good at reporting a war the way that you get a good serve at tennis if you practise long and hard enough. When I would watch television and see a conflict gathering in some remote part of the world, I found it impossible to stay still, not to pick up the phone and ask to be sent there, and as a result, I honed great skills: intuition, bravery, I guess, or perhaps it was foolhardiness, the ability to talk or push my way into any situation, but more importantly, to deal with tremendous pressure without cracking.

Then there are the stories. It is always a cliché to write about women and children during war time, but the fact is that those are the images that stick with you, and I felt in some way that when I wrote them these people would not suffer in vain. Perhaps that is very grandiose. And it was often painful. The first time I saw the agony of a child writhing on a dirty cot in a field hospital with his guts ripped open and no painkillers, I went outside, leaned against a wall and cried and vomited. But I did that only once. The rest of the time, I observed and wrote, and then got back into my car and left.

I tried to behave safely, but the thing is, you never think about your mortality when you are actually so close to it being cut short. A famous war photographer, a woman who had hidden behind a bush in Africa to photograph an execution, once said to me, ‘I never thought I would get killed because my mother loved me too much.’ My equally irrational assumption was that, as a woman in her very early thirties, I wouldn’t die because I hadn’t really lived enough yet. All the statistics made no impression on me.

Out of the most shocking recent figures on Iraq1 comes the theory that journalists are targeted, and by both sides in the conflict. In 2004, Eason Jordan, the former chief news executive of CNN, resigned from his job after insinuating that journalists were being targeted by the American military (Kurtz 2005). But if journalists are being specially selected for expunction in Iraq, this is nothing new. No British journalists died in the Falklands War of 1982, but a popular story returned from the fleet carrying British forces to the South Atlantic. A marine officer is instructing his marines. Question: ‘What do we do if we capture some Argentinian troops?’ Answer: ‘Shoot them.’ Question: ‘What do we do if we capture some Argentinian troops and we’re with a television crew?’ Answer: ‘Shoot the television crew.’ During the battle of Mostar in the spring of 1993, it was rumoured the Bosnian Croat militias put a price tag of 50 Deutschmarks on the head of every journalist. Fifty DM, even then, couldn’t buy a good lobster dinner with wine in Split. If nothing else, the price proved that William Howard Russell, who reported the Crimean war for The Times, was right when he described his fellow members of this new profession, war reporting, as a ‘luckless tribe’.

The practice of war reporting has changed a lot since the 1990s, when it could still be conducted alone or among groups of like-minded journalists, travelling together for company, cheapness (three to a hire car, two to a hotel room), and at least the notion of greater safety. Now reporters go to war with their own militias. There are always exceptions, but most reporters covering Iraq and Afghanistan – particularly the television networks – employ small armies of security guards, with high-tech tracking equipment, weaponry, and chase cars in the event the journalists are kidnapped.

The guards are usually former Special Forces soldiers who are employed by private British or American companies which promise ‘physical security and protection’. In January 2003, I went to one of these companies, Centurion, based near the Special Air Services (SAS) headquarters in Hereford, to learn some ‘hostile environment’ training. According to the Centurion website, ‘Knowledge dispels fear. In an ever more volatile and hazardous world, the reward of accurately assessing risk is the confidence of being alert to potential danger and knowing instinctively how to deal with it. This is the difference between managing threats to safety and security and merely surviving them’ (Centurion 2007).

It is true one feels safer in their company. In December 2001, during a bombing in Tora Bora, Afghanistan, I cowered on a ridge while a security guard working for CNN shouted instructions – which way the rocket was coming in and where I should throw myself on the ground. I found his authority comforting, but I also wondered if it didn’t dull my own instincts for danger, and if the habit of travelling with armed men merely attracted the trouble the armed men were meant to repel. At the start of the Iraq War, the militia accompanying an American TV crew to Tikrit opened up on a group of insurgents and were soon involved in a gun battle.

The course I took in Hereford taught me how to treat a bullet wound and which way to run during a firefight. I learned how to be a good hostage when my tutors tied a hood over my head, kicked me in the ribs, and made me lie on frozen earth for 45 minutes with my hands and legs spread wide while the sound of shots came from some nearby woods. Other advice, such as how to get out of a minefield using a long steel instrument (would that be in my luggage?), was not so useful.

‘What do you do when you approach a checkpoint?’ asked our instructor, choosing a rather humourless American reporter for the answer.

‘Look into their eyes’, she answered in a monotone drawl. ‘Always make eye contact.’ I said nothing, but I knew this was dumb advice. Had I made eye contact when I was briefly taken captive by a band of Serb paramilitaries in a remote mountainous region on the Kosovo–Montenegro border in 1999, I would probably be either dead or gang raped. I was with two French journalists and we had been on a mountain ridge interviewing the refugees who were fleeing the fighting. It was bad luck I was caught and bad luck I was with Frenchmen. French Mirage planes had just bombed Belgrade, injuring relatives and friends of the soldiers who were holding us captive.

My captors were drunk and maddened with violence. Looking them in the eye, it seemed to me, would have been mistaken for insolence – an insolent foreign woman among strong, drunk men. My eyes never left the ground and I spoke the Hail Mary again and again as they fired over our heads and marched us through the woods, beating my companions with rifle butts. They joked about how and where they would kill us, who would go first.

What saved us in the end was luck. The soldiers had a call on their radio. Their commander had captured a far bigger prize than us – an American airman. Their interest in us suddenly vanished and we were abandoned at the side of a snow-covered logging road. As we limped down the mountain to the nearest town, one of the Frenchmen broke our silence to say, ‘I was sure they were going to rape you.’ He paused for a few moments and then added, ‘And I am not sure we could have stopped it.’

The truth is that for many years I did not have a real life. I felt I lived in a parallel universe filled almost exclusively with violent conflict. Of course, people wondered why I did it. When my father was dying of cancer, I sat by his bed and we talked about many things, including faith, death and war. My father came to the USA from Naples. As a college student at the time of Pearl Harbor he enlisted in the US Air Force. ‘It was the right thing to do’, he said, ‘but I was afraid. I was chicken. I didn’t like war. I didn’t like being away from my family.’ All that was normal, he said. ‘But what you do, that’s not normal, it really isn’t.’

War attracts certain types. There are those who want to witness, describe and communicate the important and often tragic facts: a noble motive, because the world should know these things, and among most of us a noble posture (we are ‘bearing witness’). There are also those who just love it, who have a perverse attraction to suffering and danger and the euphoria that follows exposure to them: war as a higher form of bungee-jumping. I’d like to think that most of me belongs to the first camp, but I know some of me must belong to the second. Why else would I have stared into the faces of the dead couple in their crashed car in Bosnia all those years ago? Or, in Kosovo, felt the thrill, hand shaking round a cigarette, of crawling undamaged from a field where a sniper had fired at me again and again?

I went to Iraq during the invasion in 2003 for nearly five months, but even as I was packing my bag to go, I thought it would be one of my last wars. I was getting married, and I wanted a child. I knew I couldn’t sustain the pace or the loneliness. My son was born nine months after I came home from Iraq. When I first saw him, seven weeks premature and vulnerable, it seemed impossible that I’d ever want to report a war again. And yet when he was six months old I was back in Baghdad, leaving him with his father in Paris. My motive was partly curiosity – would I be a different being now that I had given birth? – and partly the fear that if I did not go back to war, I would lose my standing, my reputation and, most importantly, my nerve. In a sense, it was also a test. Would I be able to continue the life I lived before now that I was a mother? While I was pregnant, I lived in a state of denial, even going to Gaza eight weeks before my son was born. But now that he was here, I was not sure I could stomach being separated from him.

One afternoon, I got stuck in an elevator at the Al Hamra Hotel with a new crowd of young reporters I’d never seen before. They were male, this was their first conflict, and they were acting like macho asses. Some had shaved their heads to look like Bruce Willis. For years I’d insisted that war reporting was an asexual activity, that there was no difference of perception between male and female war correspondents, or at least none caused by their gender. In the lift, this seemed wrong. I had a baby. Giving birth to him had opened receptacles of fear that had been clamped shut years ago, perhaps on that first trip to Bosnia.

I would be lying if I said I did not miss the excitement of reporting a war. When the conflict in Lebanon began, I was in America teaching my son to swim. Which was more important? Logically, I knew the answer, but yearning is not logical. Reporting war had been most of my life for many years and suddenly to be pulled from it was like a junkie having their stash of drugs stolen.

The reporting I have done since Luca arrived is more tame. The responsibility I feel for his life, for keeping his mother alive long enough to see him grow up, is vast. I go to Gaza, I go to Africa, I will soon go to Afghanistan. But when I now hear gunfire, I run away and cower in a building like a normal human being. I am not sure I would drive up the nasty road to Rogbury Junction where my friends were murdered. If I found myself in a Grozny suburb while the city was falling, as I did in February 2000, I would get out as quickly as possible. And as painful as it is to admit to myself, if I found myself back in that cattle market in Abidjan with a bleeding man clinging to my leg begging me to save him, and an armed man about to kill me for my misplaced compassion – I would disentangle myself and quietly walk away.

Note

1 Editor’s note: 235 journalists and media workers were killed in Iraq between the beginning of the conflict in 2003 and November 2007. Figures from the International News Safety Institute (INSI), 28 November 2007, http://www.newssafety.com/stories/insi/insideaths281107.htm.

References

Centurion (2007) http://www.centurionsafety.net.

Committee to Protect Journalists (2006) Journalists killed in 2006. CPJ, http://www.cpj.org/killed/killed06.html.

International News Safety Institute (2007) News deaths hit all-time high. INSI, 28 November 2007, http://www.newssafety.com/stories/insi/insideaths281107.htm.

Kurtz, H. (2005) CNN’s Jordan resigns over Iraq remarks. Washington Post, February 12, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A17462-2005Feb11.html.

Questions for students

1 Journalists can pay a heavy personal and psychological price for ‘bearing witness’ to conflicts and human suffering around the globe. What are the arguments for and against such sacrifices?

2 Janine di Giovanni notes that war reporting has changed dramatically since she started doing it in the early 1990s. What are those changes and how do they affect the quality of newsgathering?

3 Is the world now too unsafe to send ‘Western’ correspondents to cover conflicts such as Iraq, Somalia and Afghanistan? What are the arguments for and against using foreign reporters as opposed to local reporters?

2

The Future of News Services and International Reporting

David Schlesinger

Introduction

JOHN OWEN

The next time you unfold your hometown newspaper (assuming it’s not the New York Times or The Times of London) and read the international stories that are published there – assuming again there are some – look carefully at the bylines. It’s virtually certain that you’ll be reading a dispatch from a correspondent from Reuters or the Associated Press (AP) with a dateline of Kabul or Baghdad. Next look for any inter national photographs and once again note the credit. The chances are that the photograph will have been taken by a Reuters or AP photojournalist somewhere in the world.

Or if you’ve never started the newspaper-reading habit or have forsaken newspapers for a variety of reasons and get your news from websites, read more carefully where they’re getting their international news. Again you’ll find, if the stories are sourced as they ought to be, a Reuters, AP or Agence France-Presse (AFP) byline or credit.

Wire-service or agency journalists are the world’s unsung journalistic heroes. Rarely do we know their names or take note of their bylines, yet without their coverage our newspapers, broadcasts or websites would be starved of first-person information gathered from around the world. Long-time AP correspondent Mort Rosenblum called agency reporters the ‘packhorses of the profession’ who are expected to work around the clock and beat the competition:

‘When major news breaks, agencies rush off a first despatch and then follow each development, writing new leads with every turn of events. Somewhere, always, a newspaper is on deadline’ (Rosenblum 1993: 57).

What today’s journalists who read all of the news agency material on their computers will never experience is the excitement of being in a newsroom when the wire services, transmitted on a separate teletype machine, set off alarms that alerted you to a big story. Rosenblum captured the excitement this way:

In an earlier time, humpbacked Model 15 printers spewed snakes of paper at the elbow of every editor. The steady clack at sixty words a minute was every newsroom’s Muzak. Periodic alarm bells cut short conversations, and editors waited for what followed the terse slug: ‘BULLETIN.’ Then they dashed off cables to their correspondents, each beginning, ‘AP says ...’ and ending, ‘proceed soonest.’ (ibid.)

And once there, or first there as most often the agencies are with their worldwide staffs and stringers, the wire-service reporters have to translate what they’ve seen and experienced and gathered by talking to credible sources into a coherent story beyond a jumble of information. More often than not, according to the late columnist and writer Lars Erik Nelson, it was the ‘hard-nosed wire-service reporter’ who could first answer the question that made and still makes grown men and women journalists perspire and reduces them to a bundle of anxieties on deadline: ‘What’s the lead?’ (quoted in Moisy 1996: 2).

It is the news agencies that have historically made the deadline judgements about the lead and what the news was in the event or story they’d covered on behalf of their clients – newspapers, radio stations and TV networks around the world.

And if today the news agencies are taken for granted, their journalism not fully understood or appreciated by the general public, there is a rich and dramatic history for each of them. The AP grew out of one New York newspaper owner’s determination to be the first to get coverage of the Mexican War that broke out in 1846, using pony express relays, stagecoaches and then the telegraph to scoop the competition. But then Moses Yale Beach of the New York Sun,