From the Frontline: October 2007 Archives
Johnston remembers
Gaza kidnap survivor, Alan Johnston talked on Panorama about how he imagined it all ending, "In an interview for BBC1's Panorama Mr Johnston, 45, said: “I imagined being put into that red suit they would make me wear for videos. I imagined one of them in a hood and...more
Sac Bee pulls blog plug
It looks as though the Sacramento Bee's man in Iraq has been biting off more than his blog can chew, On October 23, Bobby posted an entry bragging about being an arrogant jackass to a US soldier manning a security checkpoint. Here's how Calvan himself describes his attitude toward his...more
Correspondent come novelist in Camden
When Walkley Award-winning journalist Erina Reddan embarked on a whirlwind courtship with Victor Del Rio, little did she know she was about to marry into a family of witches whose matriarch allegedly murdered five husbands and was also a drug runner who operated a brothel. The exciting tales of Victor's...more
Apps back at work
Peter Apps worked as a foreign correspondent for Reuters until he was paralysed 13 months ago and now he's back, Using voice recognition software, a tape recorder for interviews and accompanied by a support worker, I went back to work and the real world in June after finally leaving...more
National Geographic pay tribute to Boulat
Marilyn from National Geographic drops by in the comments to alert us to a NGS tribute page to Alexandra Boulat who was a Frontline Club member and event speaker and who recently passed away....more
Burmese hacks back on the beat
Win Ko Ko Latt, of the weekly Eleven journal, and Nay Linn Aung, of the 7-days journal, have both been freed and are back at work, officials at their companies told. Both newspapers are private, Myanmar-language weeklies that operate under the constant watch of military censors, who tightly control the...more
Targetted by the mafia
Lirio Abbate has an unwelcome distinction among Italian journalists: correspondent in Sicily for the state news agency Ansa and La Stampa newspaper, he has had his own armed police escort for the past six months. When anti-Mafia investigators using wiretaps heard mobsters discussing how to silence 37-year-old Abbate in revenge...more
He ate censors for breakfast
Canadian reporter Bill Boss died last week at 90 years old. He was buried on Saturday, First as a soldier, then as a civilian reporter, Boss followed the Canadian army through Italy - at one point actually preceding the troops into Florence after it was liberated by Italian partisans. He...more
Meeting Resistance
Meeting Resistance, a film by Steve Connors and Molly Bingham, opens this week in the US. It's a film about the 'insurgency' in Iraq from the 'insurgent's' point of view. It portrays a side of the story that is rarely told in western media. The Washington Post says, Polished...more
Embed a granny
Jane Stillwater is a 65-year old Californian grandmother and blogger takes the obvious course of all grandmothers her age and gone and paid her way for an embed position in Iraq. Chris Vallance from the BBC radio's Pods & Blogs show pulls out a quote from Stillwater's past, The violence...more
Getting the story out
Writing in Ha'aretz, Yotam Feldman tells it as it is, or was, and how he got the story out of Burma, It's 4 A.M. at Bangkok airport. Minutes before my plane is to lift off for Rangoon, I get a call on my mobile. In loose English with an Asian...more
Matt Frei veers off road hits desk
After 17 years of on the road reporting, much of it in America, the BBC's Matt Frei finds himself "anchoring" BBC World News America from behind a desk in Washington. And he seems to like the ride so far, I have to admit I'm rather enjoying all the promotional...more
Mark Forbes wins ASTSS Media Award 2007
A couple of weeks old maybe, but here's Mark Forbe's, who works as a foreign correspondent for The Age, accepting the Australasian Society for Traumatic Stress Studies 2007 Media Award for his reporting from Indonesia, Forbes received the award for his coverage of the Garuda Airlines crash at Yogyakarta...more
Call to action
Aidan White is back in action in this post, after that post, with a call to action announced this week from the International Federation of Journalists for security for mediafolk in Iraq, The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) today called on the international community to take special action to confront...more
Do journalists need a special safety convention?
From a recent debate at the Frontline Club between Geoffrey Robertson QC, Knut Doerman (ICRC), Aidan White (IFJ) and moderated by Prof Stewart Purvis (City University). Aidan White expands on the subject on the IFJ blog, There’s no better example of a country that fails to protect journalists than...more
Alexandra Boulat
Photojournalist and co-founder of the VII photo agency, Alexandra Boulat has died at the age of 45 in Paris from complications of a brain aneurysm. She has previously spoken at the Frontline club, This summer, as factional fighting between Fatah and Hamas militants came to a boil inside the...more
Scribe in sculpture
According to PhilStar, plans are afoot in Manilla to erect a sculpture in honour of Philippine STAR founding publisher and foreign correspondent Maximo Soliven. Speaking at Manila city hall on Wednesday Mayor Alfredo Lim said, “We are already talking about putting up a statue of Max Soliven along the...more
di Giovanni at the UN
War reporter Janine di Giovanni found herself among generals and activists at the UN this week calling for a halt to the illicit small arms trade, Arms control campaigners who have gathered more than one million signatures on a petition calling for the treaty formation said that in addition...more
Susman profiled
Baghdad based LA Times reporter Tina Susman discusses working as a foreign correspondent in Editor & Publisher, Susman is witnessing what she calls "one of the biggest, if not the biggest story of our generation as journalists." She is chief of the Los Angeles Times' Baghdad bureau, an appointment...more
From the First World War frontline
Exactly what it says on the tin. WW1: Experiences of an English Soldier consists of letters from the frontline during the First World War brought to you by Harry Lamin via blogpower from beyond the grave. via Pods & Blogs...more
The most dangerous man in Iraq in London
Fresh from winning a Lovejoy, John F Burns heads to London, The reporter John F. Burns, whom Chemical Ali mocked as "the most dangerous man in Iraq", has returned to run the London bureau of 'The New York Times'. He tells Ian Burrell about life working as a journalist inside...more
Dozier gets the Duhamel
CBS News correspondent Kimberly Dozier received the Helen Duhamel Achievement Award at the Association for Women in Communications National Conference in Orlando last Saturday, Dozier survived a 500-pound car bomb in Iraq last year that killed two CBS colleagues, cameraman Paul Douglas and soundman James Brolan, along with a U.S....more
Gonzalo Guillen exits Colombia
According to the BBC, foreign correspondent Gonzalo Guillen in Colombia has exited the country after receiving numerous death threats since Columbian President President Alvaro Uribe railed against him on October 3rd. [Guillen] has had to flee the country after being criticised by President Alvaro Uribe and receiving death threats. Mr...more
Behind the scenes - Shake hands with the devil
Following on from this post, I contacted Zimbabwe based Frontline Club member Robert Adams through the Frontline network. I wanted to ask him about the filming of the behind the scenes documentary that will accompany the film based on Lt. Gen. Roméo Dallaire's book, Shake hands with the devil,...more
Shake hands with the devil
Over on the Frontline Network, Zimbabwe based Robert Adams tells us about a film he helped make about the story behind the filming of Shake hands with the devil - a film based on the book by Lt. Gen. Roméo Dallaire. Robert tells us, I worked on a movie...more
Burma footage still getting out
You can shut the internet down, but you can't stop the flow of film. The footage above was taken a couple of days ago and we can only assume it was smuggled out the old fashioned way - on a memory stick, in a shoe, in a cigarette packet etc....more
Dodging the goons in Rangoon
Scouring the net for Burma-related stuff - there's getting less and less from the ground - I come across Frontline's Ben Hammersley and an intriguing wee snippet from the year 2000's where are they now file, When I got to Rangoon Airport, I knew I would be searched. I had...more
Wanna buy a Pulitzer
One awarded to Newsday for public service newspaper journalism in 1974 appears to have been sold on Ebay for $4,000 via martinstabe and in the comments... "They actually have several Pulitzers on sale, all from Newsday. Kinda depressing, actually."...more
"I hate all Iranians"
Seymour Hersh gnaws through the Bush/Cheney case for the next Iraq in errr... Iran....more
And in bomb news...
This is a big bomb....more
Burns gets a Lovejoy
Colby College has given its annual Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award to a longtime New York Times foreign correspondent who has won the Pulitzer Prize on two occasions... ...John F. Burns is a longtime foreign correspondent for The New York Times who won the Pulitzer in 1993 for his coverage of...more
Easy as ABC
When ABC's senior foreign correspondent Jim Sciutto crossed into Myanmar today from neighboring Thailand the authorities took away his camera. So he filed his report for World News and the webcast, with the next best thing, his cell phone. link via BoingBoing...more
Some of us get out quite a lot, doncha know
The Washington Post's Baghdad bureau chief, Ellen Knickmeyer, lays into a Editor & Publisher's David S. Hirschman vis a vis stay-at-home correspondents in Iraq, "It is critical in judging the quality of reporting in Iraq to know how much of it the reporter has actually seen for himself or herself;...more
Snowball war correspondent
The streets of Rhondda valley in Wales prove to be a tad dangerous for this Sky News reporter....more
5 tips for better blogging
The Daily Telegraph's Shane Richmond does a very good job of sifting through a thread about blogging to come up with 5 tips on building a blog audience. Here's number one, 1. Get prominent bloggers to link to you - Chris Garrett says: "That involves (for best chances) being known...more
Barbi in a burqa
Looking for something for the little ones? The perfect Kabul keepsake - Barbi in a Burqa. Not from Kabul, from California. via Afghanistanica. if you're into dogs more than kids, how about a dog burqa. Big in NYC I'm hearing,...more
Swedish journalists feel the Burmese heat
Several Swedish and Danish news media outlets said on Monday they had been contacted by Burmese regime officials urging them to withdraw their reporters from the country for their own safety. link Meanwhile Reporters without borders lay into the Burmese junta once again, "Several other correspondents of foreign news media,...more
What it's like to be in a firefight
John D McHugh was shot in Afghanistan and was lucky to survive. He talked at the Frontline Club about his experience working as a photographer in Afghanistan. Today, on his blog, he retells the story he wrote from his hospital bed, So, here it is. This is the account I...more
Is the media a weapon?
Retired major-general Lewis MacKenzie was having a natter during his keynote at the University of Waterloo in Canada when I got onto the subject of war reporting. It's all just too darned quick these days, MacKenzie, known for leading peacekeeping troops in the former Yugoslavia... commanded soldiers in the Gaza...more
From war correspondent to lawyer
C. Justin Brown recounts his life as a war correspondent in the Maryland Daily Record. Last year, after being nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for his Balkans reporting, he ditched the flak jacket for a lawyer's wig, Looking outside, he saw a NATO Tomahawk missile slam into the upper floors...more
The Saffron suppression
The most senior official to defect so far, Hla Win [a former intelligence officer for Burma's ruling junta ], said: 'Many more people have been killed in recent days than you've heard about. The bodies can be counted in several thousand.' Mr Win, who spoke out as a Swedish diplomat...more
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