From the Frontline: March 2008 Archives
Photojournalist Dith Pran dies
The photojournalist Dith Pran died last night in a New Jersey hospital. Pran first became known to the wider world in 1980 when the New York Times reporter Sydney Schanberg published his book The Death and Life of Dith Pran. The book was later made into the film The...more
Anita Coulson blogs from Zimbabwe
Now blogging with us at From the frontline is Anita Coulson. She's ex-BBC and an Africa specialist. She is in Zimbabwe to cover the elections and blog what she sees and hears on the streets of Harare and beyond. It's a fascinating read and blogged in difficult circumstances. The...more
Virtual Vietnam Wall
The Vietnam Wall monument in Washington D.C. commemorates the lives of 58,256 American soldiers killed during the Vietnam War, or as the Vietnamese call it the American War. This week the wall goes online. Footnote.com is an interactive representation of the wall. the site seems to be having some...more
Dig the new breed
Interesting blog by Geofrrey Hiller that aims to bring to our attention the work of "a new breed of documentary photographers". Each post focuses on one image from one photographer. As the blog blurb says, "Verve is a reminder of the power of the still image." Images like the...more
Back to Kurdistan
On the BBC World Service, Michael Goldfarb - author of Ahmad's War, Ahmad's Peace: Surviving Under Saddam and Dying in the New Iraq - writes and talks about returning to Kurdistan five years after the outbreak of war in Iraq, Erbil, Kurdistan, northern Iraq - every foreign correspondent has one...more
Fake news and a lot of lousy reporting
During a talk at the University of Regina in Canada last night, Pulitzer prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh had a go at the lousy reporting and fake news coming out of war zones today. When he's looking for real news he turns to translations of the local press, War reporters...more
Bush's War
The PBS Frontline TV show puts online the two part documentary called Bush's War. The vast multimedia report includes over 400 interviews and 175 video clips. The Producer Michael Kirk answered questions online at the Washington Post, Our focus was the war about the war. We focused on the...more
Pilger gets doctored
Author, journalist and documentary film maker John Pilger will recieve an honorary doctorate at Rhodes Universtity in Grahamstown in South Africa this coming Sunday according to the Daily Dispatch, Pilger, who already has several doctorates from universities around the world, will be given the degree of Doctor of Literature honoris...more
Mapping the media
Interesting wee mapping experiment that takes an image of the world and maps the number of stories written about different countries and lays it on top of the map. The results, unsurprisingly, tells us much of the planet goes unreported. Nicolas Kayser-Bril explains more, These maps allow you to...more
Independent Kosovo
[video:brightcove:1473792772] Latest debate from the Frontline Club events room in Paddington, London on Independence in Kosovo is now online. The discussion includes contributions from journalist and former spokesman for the Kosova government Daut Dauti, Balkan specialist author/journalist Tim Judah, journalist Misha Glenny who specialises in south-eastern Europe, Dr Nebojsa Vladisavljevic...more
Wanna be a Hizballah Fighter?
Writing on the TIME blog reporter Andrew Lee Butters tells how his assistant, Rami Aysha, spoke to a few Hizballah fighters from his neighbourhood to find out how you go about becoming a Hizballah Fighter, Two important themes stick out: from the beginning, the training stresses the path to martyrdom,...more
Beijing bashes foreign media
After expelling the few remaining foreign journalists from Tibet last week, the Chinese government has attacked foreign media for what it sees as biased reporting. The International Herald Tribune has more, "At a time when China is promising to become more open with the world, this is a big disappointment,"...more
Dodging the death toll
As the number of dead American soldiers in the Iraq war hits the 4,000 mark Katharine Zaleski at The Huffington Post scans through the American newspapers and finds that just two of the nearly 2,500 newspapers in the USA give up the front page to the dizzying death toll....more
Talking with the Taliban
The Globe & Mail's Graeme Smith puts together an in depth multimedia production called Talking with the Taliban for Canada's biggest newspaper. The piece includes 42 unedited interviews with Taliban fighters all of whom were asked the same set of questions by a researcher the newspaper sent to talk...more
Bearers of bad tidings
French TV journalist Wissam Sharaf is leaving France and heading back to his native Lebanon. But, he's not heading there for some 'get back to my root's' goodness. He thinks Lebabon is "gonna move" And he's not alone. The Los Angeles Times reports on how journalists are seen as the...more
Getting the story - Kabul
Writing on the Reuters photographer's blog Ahmad Masood gives a great wee bit of insight into the working life of a photographer on the Kabul beat and the process he goes through when responding to a suspected bomb, I always call another photographer, or the Reuters Television producer, to...more
David Pratt on reporting Iraq
David Pratt remembers working as a journalist in Iraq, the toll on reporters like Caroline Hawley who we blogged about earlier today, and the camaraderie that builds up when working on the frontline of history and conflict, More than anything I'll remember the Iraq war in this way: a series...more
Defence editor required
Recruitment agency Media Contacts runs an advert in The Guardian looking for a Defence editor. Does this sound like you? Are you an expert in defence? Then this defence editor position is exactly what you are looking for. This is a chance to use your knowledge on defence on the...more
The stress of war reporting
Catherine Philp writes a great piece in The Times about the personal toll of working as a journalist in Iraq. The feature outlines the dangers and the sheer psychological toll of reporting from a conflict zone that has proved the most deadly in history for journalists. The BBC's Caroline Hawley...more
5 years on at the Frontline Club
[video:brightcove:1460747551] Not to be outdone, we here at The Frontline Club mark the 5th anniversary of the Iraq war with a discussion in the club's event room. Two journalists who were working in Iraq at the time discuss the situation. John Burns was the New York Times Bureau Chief in...more
Fewer reporters in Iraq
The Press Gazette rounds up just how many British media organisations remain in Iraq. There are less British news outlets there than at anytime since the beginning of the American led invasion. The article details the number of people each bureau holds to mark the 5th anniversary since the most...more
Ilyas Shurpayev killed
According to reports from Novosti Ilyas Shurpayev, a Russian television journalist, has been found dead in his apartment in the northeast of Moscow. The 32 year old was known for reporting from Russia's North Caucasus including the republic of Daghestan, Georgia's breakaway republic of Abkhazia and Chechnya, "According to a...more
Welsh fears for Philip Jones Griffiths collection
According to The Western Mail Frontline Club Honorary member Philip Jones Griffiths spent the last seven years of his life trying to find a permanent home for his photos. However it appears he failed to reach an agreement with a number of Welsh institutions including Bangor, Aberystwyth and Newport Universities...more
Nomination call for 2008 Kurt Schork Awards
The nomination phase for the Kurt Schork Awards in International Journalism is now open and the deadline for receipt of entries is June 1, 2008. Local reporters from non OECD or EU countries and freelancers are eligible to enter, Two $5,000 prizes are awarded each year, one to a local...more
Terry Lloyd's widow demands truth
In an interview to be broadcast tonight on ITV Lynn Lloyd, the widow of ITN war reporter Terry Lloyd who was killed by American troops in March 2003, says she wants to know the name of the man who killed her husband, A coroner recorded a verdict of unlawful killing...more
The old crusty reporter is not appearing any more
[video:youtube:E7Zj_dNwOdk] Now, here's a really tough assignment for a group of journalists. Go find some bars full of journalists and report on them... The Wall Street Journal goes coast to coast across the United States and over to Fleet Street in London to look at some famed journalist drinking dens...more
Dateline Iraq
[video:youtube:NhHjwOU_mOA] Three journalists speak about working in Iraq for Dateline Iraq, a production by the Committee to Protect journalists. TIME Magazine's Bobby Ghosh, New York Times reporter James Glanz and freelancer Jehad Nga all feature and compare notes about how things were back in 2003 and how things are in...more
Philip Jones Griffiths (1936 - 2008)
[video:brightcove:1394647866] After a lengthy battle with cancer, Philip Jones Griffiths sadly passed away on Wednesday 19 March. Philip was a Frontline Club member and was widely considered to be one of the greatest war photographers of the twentieth century. He is best remembered for his work on the war in...more
Getting into Lhasa
On the MSNBC World blog Bo Gu, an Assistant News Producer at NBC, describes how she managed to get into Lhasa last Sunday, "The House of Shambala? No way, I’m not going there," said the Tibetan taxi driver, his wrinkled, tanned face looking nervous. "It’s really chaotic in Lhasa...more
Magnum Wars
Today Magnum launch a four episode series of photo essays on the Magnum in Motion site and simultaneously on Slate. The four episodes explore the theme of war. The starting point was something Philip Jones Griffiths said in an interview in 2006, "Photographers are either mud people or sand...more
Kill the cliché
You can't write for toffee? Your sub-editor's out to lunch and your newspaper style guide's as old as the hills? A new website called Kill the cliché aims to name, shame and hang, draw and quarter overuse of clichés in newspapers. Currently the world news sections of six major American...more
Can you hear me Baghdad?
[video:youtube:qU1UL0s9qqY] Daniel Finkelstein cranks up the crackly internet videophone and calls fellow Times journalist and blogger Deborah Haynes in Baghdad. You can see and hear the result by clicking the video above. As Daniel says, "Hopefully we'll have a better line next time." Amen....more
Tired of Iraq
David Bauder at the Associated Press pulls together a few scary stats about the Iraq war and American mainstream media's coverage of it, For the first 10 weeks of the year, the war accounted for three per cent of television, newspaper and Internet stories in the Project for Excellence in...more
Bearing Witness
Reuters and MediaStorm have partnered to produce a stunning multimedia production to mark the fifth anniversary of the war in Iraq. It's quite the mammoth undertaking with five chapters profiling three journalists with video, photography and snazzy graphics, The site features profiles of three Reuter’s journalists who have more...more
A short guide to Iraq
In 1943 the American military issued a pamphlet to guide their soldiers in Iraq. The GI Pamphlet blog discovered a copy in an old trunk and has re-published it in full, We found this historical gem in an old trunk which was crammed with my mother’s World War II...more
Going black in China
Marek Pruszewicz, editor of BBC World, describes how BBC reports on the unrest in Tibet were blacked out in China. The BBC's Beijing-based James Reynolds illustrated the problem with the aid of two televisions, James Reynolds, who is based in Beijing, came up with a very simple but effective means...more
Jinx remembers George
George Rodger was one of Britain's leading war photographers famed for taking the first pictures of Belsen concentration at the end of the Second World War. His picture of St. Paul's Cathedral graces the Frontline Club restaurant. His wife, Jinx Rodgers, remembers him and their work together in The...more
Carsten Thomassen hearing opens
The court hearing into the death of Norwegian journalist Carsten Thomassen opened last week. Thomassen died of injuries he received during an attack at Serena hotel in Kabul in January. Opening the hearing Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Stoere admitted the Foreign Office did not have any emergency plans for the...more
Three great reasons to...
... listen to this week's NPR On the Media podcast. First up, Pulitzer prizer winner Seymour Hersh reveals how he broke the My Lai massacre story during the Vietnam war and how he scooped the Abu Grahib story. Second up, a discussion about the life and importance of Robert Capa...more
Only the rich report
Rageh Omaar recently returned to Iraq to catch up with people he has know over the last ten years from reporting there. Operating as a journalist there, he says, has never been harder and increasingly, it is only the rich media companies that can afford to send reporters, One of...more
Iraqi journalist shot dead
Xinhua reports that an Iraqi journalist was shot dead in central Baghdad today. "Qasim Abdul Hussein al-Eqabi, a journalist working for the local al-Muwatin newspaper was killed when unknown gunmen in two cars showered him with bullets near the National Theater in Karrada neighborhood," said Jabbar Tarrad, the new chief...more
Peter Arnett - We need to know what happens in wars
Long serving war reporter and 1966 Pulitzer prize winner Peter Arnett spoke to students in Texas this week about the job of journalism in a war zone. Arnett reported from the Vietnam war for a period of thirteen years and he compared that experience to present day Iraq, Reports...more
Harare customs
McClatchy Newspapers correspondent Shashank Bengali arrives at Harare airport in Zimbabwe fearful of the worst. Fortunately, the rubber glove wasn't needed. The customs officers just wanted drugs, "Are you carrying drugs?" he asked. I was somewhat relieved. Getting questioned by authorities in Zimbabwe, if you're a foreign visitor, can often...more
Online Free Expression Day
Reporters without Borders today launch the first Online Free Expression Day. This will be an annual event happening every March 12 to help protect bloggers who are increasingly targeted in countries with state controlled media. The campaign focuses on Burma, China, Cuba, Egypt, Eritrea, North Korea, Tunisia, Turkmenistan and Vietnam,...more
Former Scoopt head honcho blogs for Frontline
Great to have Scoopt founder Kyle MacRae blogging with us here at From the Frontline. Kyle founded the world's first citizen journalism photograph agency - Scoopt.com - in 2005. He's been at the forefront of digital media industry ever since. He sold the company to Getty Imgaes a year...more
Calling all angry journalists
Self explanatory... You're a journalist... You need to vent... Now you have a place to do it. Anonymously....more
Burmese bloggers continue to risk their lives
Some five months on since the violent suppression of the protest movement led by monks in Burma and the situation for bloggers is no better. The bloggers, who were such an important part of getting images, video and eyewitness accounts out of the country, continue to blog about life in...more
America's media failed
CNN's Christiane Amanpour, who recently relocated from the UK to the US, was recently interviewed by former TV man Marvin Kalb at the National Press Club. Amanpour said the profession “failed to do our duty†in the run up to the Iraq war. She also touched on the leading...more
Media priorities
It's hard not not hard to agree with the first comment on this blog about Frontline Club member Marcus Bleasdale's multimedia report from the Democratic Republic of Congo. "nonstop media coverage because one of our Governors had some sex with an expensive whore, but this gets nothing." link The commenter...more
Viagra? Hash? Iraqi army marshal's uniform?
[video:youtube:aGzGzyyDLNM] Your typical frontline trader offering your typical frontline goods to your typical soldier soldiering in your typical Middle East war zone. via The Observers....more
The Habbaniya bookshelf
Tony Perry, a staffer with the LA Times and regular visitor to Iraq, takes us on a tour of a typical bookshelf found in American soldier's barracks on a recent trip to Iraq, As I jump from base to base in Anbar province where the Marines are stationed, I...more
Frontline students
Students from the University of Indiana descended upon the Frontline Club this week to meet and talk with New York Times London Bureau Chief John Burns. John treated them to a talk about his experiences as a war reporter and about "embedding". One of the students, Rosemary Pennington, blogged...more
Asne Seierstad in 5 minutes
Following on from her BBC radio interview with Simon Mayo, war reporter Asne Seierstad gets the 5-minute interview treatment in The Independent today, The most surprising thing to happen to me was ... Realising that people read my books all around the world. That surprises me all the time....more
"Like being in the mouth of a tuba"
In a series of behind the scenes films ITV's Mark Austin and Phil Reay Smith describe life working as reporters in Helmand province, Afghanistan. And by the looks of things it's all rather snug. As Mark says, "It's the best food in terms of being in a theatre of...more
Deborah Haynes gets upgraded
Times newspaper reporter Deborah Haynes blogs about the rigmarole associated with getting flights in Iraq as she seeks out the 'Freedom Express' on a mission to Mosul only to get upgraded to cockpit class, Travelling to northern Iraq for an embed is always a bit of a gamble because...more
Back to foreign correspondent school
A Prague-based not for profit outfit called TOL is about to start offering a foreign correspondent training program for students and young journalists, The nine-day course, led by experienced foreign correspondents, will teach participants the essential skills of international reporting. One full scholarship will be given to an applicant from...more
Iraq war reporters talk five years on
Five years since the war in Iraq kicked off, NPR talk to four reporters who have covered the war over the last half decade. They are Anne Garrels, John F. Burns, Ted Koppel and Hoda Abdel-Hamid, Iraq has changed dramatically in the last five years for journalists covering the...more
"Gets nasty, get down to business"
[video:youtube:D99NHb6B03s] I really do not know what to say... via Abu Muqawama...more
"She wouldn't last five minutes in a war zone"
Nicola Sadler returns from two months in a war zone reporting for Fox News to discover her sister Brooke - pictured above - fancies a shot at war reporting, just like Nicola and war correspondent Dad Brent Sadler. Nicola is not amused. The Daily Mail has more, Recently, after...more
10 days to war
Interesting experiment from the BBC Newsnight team starting on March 10. 10 Days to War is a dramdoc created to mark the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. Writing on the BBC Editor's blog Peter Barron explains, The eight episodes, each of which focuses on the events and issues...more
"More nervous than when I read the 10 o'clock news"
Frontline club member George Alagiah received his OBE for services to journalism this week. He admitted feeling "hugely honoured" by the award and that meeting the Queen got his nerves going a bit more than the day job does, "I think because there is history behind all of this...more
Angola in the frame
War artist John Keane has covered war from the Falklands to the Gulf War. However, his latest work concentrates on peacetime Angola. In The Independent he talks about how he works using digital photography in the field before hammering out the canvases in his studio in London, Back in...more
Buying a sandwich in Baghdad
The New York Times run Baghdad Bureau is shaping up to be quite an interesting group blog. Today, Balen Y. Younis who is an Iraqi employee of The New York Times, writes about working for the newspaper, the reaction of friends when he told them he was going to...more
Kidnap victim John Martinkus back in Afghanistan
SBS Dateline Video Journalist John Martinkus returns to Afghanistan to report on his time spent travelling with the US 82nd Airborne in Afghanistan. John was kidnapped in 2004, where he was also embedded with US forces. At the time the BBC reported that Google saved him when his captors...more
News gathering in Afghanistan
[video:youtube:rPaTgRPr4O4] Here's a brief video of how a number of Afghanistan based journalists followed a breaking story from their bases in Kabul. How good stringers and local knowledge are invaluable and the value of input from military sources, Veteran reporter and filmmaker Bill Gentile profiles noted journalists from The New...more
Social networking sites have brought new opportunities for journalists, and new problems
Social networking sites like Facebook and Bebo are awash with video and pictures uploaded by the general public. News organisations are grappling with what they can and can’t use from the sites, but there is no agreed standard and recent months have seen them make a litany of mistakes. In...more
All about story-telling
MSNBC foreign correspondent Martin Fletcher remembers the good days, the carefree times and the big budgets. It's all change now isn't it Martin... We traveled to the airport in black limousines chauffeured by stiff-backed men in black suits and caps. We flew first class and became connoisseurs of fine wines....more
"It’s my story, I want to cover it"
News reader and foreign correspondent Carol Barnes was fighting for her life last night after suffering a massive stroke at her home in Brighton. Carol had been due to fly out to South Africa in a few days' time. Sir David Nicholas, former head of ITN remembers an occasion...more
2008 British Press Awards
The 2008 British Press Awards nominees were announced today. Sean Smith, from the previous post, is up for the new category of "Digital journalist of the year" while the contenders for Foreign Reporter of the year consist of almost all Frontline Club members, Christina Lamb from the Sunday Times,...more
Photographer Sean Smith talks at the Frontline Club
[video:brightcove:1442780964] Photographer Sean Smith won the Press Photographer’s Year 2007: Photograph of the Year and Best News photo for his image of a hooded detainee in Hawijah, Iraq. Last week he spoke at the Frontline Club. Click the video above to watch the talk....more
Will Mugabe win again?
[video:brightcove:1442780960] With the elections just around the corner the discussion at the Frontline Club turns to Zimbabwe and the possibilities for change or not with Zimbabwean finance minister Simba Makoni challenging Robert Mugabe in the elections. The discussion is chaired by Adam Roberts, an Africa specialist with the Economist. Taking...more
The Angel of Grozny
Simon Mayo at BBC Radio 5 Live talks to war correspondent Asne Sierstad about her work in Chechnya over the past decade and her new book The Angel of Grozny. You can listen to the interview direct here or subscribe to the Daily Mayo podcast, Norwegian journalist Asne Sierstad has...more
A day in the life of a Burmese journalist
Aye Chan Myate, who was until recently a senior editor with a weekly journal in Rangoon, writes in The Irrawaddy what it's like to be a working journalist in Rangoon. Doesn't sound a whole lot of fun, In our newsroom, only the management desk and the copy-typists worked with...more
Pyongyang media scrum
Reuters photographer David Gray recently visited North Korea to cover the two day visit of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. His first visit to the peninsular began with a media scrum, What happened next must have been a rather unusual sight for North Korea - a media scrum. The...more
Oliver Poole in the Red Zone
Oliver Poole, a Frontline Club member we've blogged about previously, is pictured hard at work in a British base in Majar al-Kabir, 250 miles south-east of Baghdad. Oliver wrote Red Zone and the publisher Reportage Press has a Flickr photo group of snaps from and of its writers....more
The janjaweed are back
One of the 2006 George Polk Award winners, Lydia Polgreen, writes about a new scorched earth policy in the Darfur region of Sudan for the New York Times. The newspaper includes another excellent multimedia photoreport this time by Lynsey Addario....more
Want to be a foreign correspondent? Get a partner with a good job
According to Poynter blogger Fons Tuinstra the only reason many foreign correspondents survive is because their partner has a decent job. Fons talks about the state of Dutch foreign correspondents in the light of a recent report in De Journalist (in Dutch) - a magazine for the NVJ union for...more
NATO discusses digital media
NATO Review discusses the effects of new media and blogging upon the amount and quality of information coming out of warzones today. The video discussion includes contributions from the founder of liveleak.com - a haven for bomb blasts, humvee crashes and the like. The discussion accompanies an article by our...more
A life up front
Writing in the LA Times Clancy Sigal reviews a new book of Bill Mauldin: A Life Up Front by Todd DePastino about the renowned war cartoonist Bill Maudlin. Maudlin, who died in 2003, is most remembered for his World War II cartoons although he later worked in Korea, Vietnam...more
2008 Knight International Journalism Awards
The nomination phase for the 2008 Knight International Journalism Awards is now open. Submission deadline is April 4, The Knight Awards is hosted by the International Center for Journalists. The Awards recognize international journalists who demonstrate an extraordinary devotion to the craft by upholding the highest journalistic standards despite overwhelming...more
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