Forum Blog
Sangin Patrol and the Mastiff
[video:youtube:z7oJLwUUEHg] This morning I went on patrol with the Queen’s Company of the Grenadier Guards and the First Kandak of the Afghan National Army commanded by Major Attaullah. The commander of the British ‘mentors†was Colour Sergeant “Spook†Boak. The job of training and fighting with indigenous forces is the sort of role that Special […]
Sangin River
[video:youtube:aP9WHMG2a90] I arrived in Sangin this morning by helicopter and met up with the Queens Company, Grenadier Guards. The was a soldier in the Queens Company 20 years ago. When the Parachute Regiment were in Sangin last year they were subject to almost constant attack from the Taliban. Attacks now are relatively infrequent but you […]
Peter and the Gandamac Lodge
[video:youtube:2iltEbDjM_M] While waiting in Kabul, to come down to Helmand, I stayed at Peter Jouvenal’s Gandamac Lodge. It’s run by Peter and his Afghan wife, Hassina, and I have never stayed anywhere quite like it. I was in Kabul in 2001 when Peter decided to open a guesthouse there. He had just finished as John […]
Afghanistan and the Grenadier Guards
I am off to spend some time with my old army unit who are currently in the thick of it in Helmand, Afghanistan. I used to be a Captain in the Grenadier Guards 20 years ago. I left in 1987 and went out to Afghanistan to become an independent video journalist. I have been back […]
Inside Out – September 07
August finds me like most other Londoners who for various reasons are not on holiday in some exotic clime grumbling constantly about the dismal weather. And those of us in London are the lucky ones. No flash floods, no hurricanes, no monster storms, no death defying heat waves. But that said, we’d still like to […]
Inside Out – August 07
They don’t make them anymore like Horst Faas. Anyone who had the privilege of hearing Faas at two recent Frontline Club events held in association with The Associated Press would have come away with that feeling. Faas, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner for his photography, is now 74 and confined to a wheel chair. He […]
Inside Out – July 07
I started writing this en-route to Frontline’s first event in Kiev amid rumours that Alan Johnston would finally be released. The nightmare for the Johnston family, his loved ones and colleagues looked set to end. At the same the staff of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR) were just coming to terms with […]
Inside Out – June 07
How about this for a stunning statistic? In February, more than a third (37%) of US internet users visited MySpace.com. When Rupert Murdoch -that mogul of moguls of old media – purchased MySpace in 2003 for $580 million he grabbed a sizzling hot property in the new media world. MySpace and its ambitious rival, Facebook.com […]
Frontline’s future
I have just come back from New York where the Frontline Club has put on its maiden US event. I was also looking into the possibility of opening a sister club along the lines of the London club. The event we held focused on our duty, as journalists, to cover the other point of view in […]
Inside Out – May 07
So would a Frontline Club and Forum work in the United States? If so, where? In New York? In Washington? That’s a question Vaughan and Pranvera Smith and many of us involved in the Frontline Club since its inception have asked ourselves. Not that Vaughan and Pranvera don’t have enough on their plates in Paddington […]
Inside Out – April 07
If you believe that newspapers should still be relied on for coverage of issues that matter then you have to be dismayed by their paltry reporting of Killing the Messenger. This was the International News Safety Institute’s (INSI) most comprehensive ever examination of the 1,000 deaths of journalists over a 10-year period. I declare an […]
Inside Out – March 07
When Gary Knight and Rod Nordland appeared at the Frontline Club in February, they were just back from a Newsweek assignment in Darfur. Gary’s pictures and Rod’s narrative reminded us what a humanitarian crisis Darfur remains and how the situation continues to deteriorate while the world is not watching. In fact, Knight and Nordland represented […]
Inside Out – February 07
Two years ago, CBS News introduced its “Public Eye” forum as part of its re-launched and revamped website. One of the publicity grabbing things it did was to shoot video of a CBS News editorial meeting and post it on the website. The notion was that the public could then see for itself how the […]
Inside Out – December 06
It was vintage Marie Colvin. It was 19 October and the Frontline Club was heaving, jammed with journalists and human rights activists gathered to pay tribute to the Russian reporter Anna Politkovskaya. Politkovskaya had been murdered in the lift of her apartment building in Moscow six days earlier. Emotions were running high in the Forum, […]
Inside Out – October 06
Every so often at the Frontline Club there’s a debate that underscores why Vaughan Smith decided to establish it in the first place. That debate took place at the tribute to Martin Adler, the Swedish freelance, who was shot dead in Mogadishu in June. The debate centred on whether broadcasters or news agencies had a […]
Inside Out – September 06
When a senior editor at one of Britain’s leading newspapers was called and invited as a guest to one of our events he said that he’d never set foot in the Frontline Club and called it a “wanky concept”. It is tempting to name the editor involved but I will follow the common UK practice […]
Inside Out – July 06
What Ron McCullagh didn’t tell you in his moving tribute to Martin Adler is that the British press didn’t even name him when they reported his death. He was a “Swedish cameraman” who was killed on assignment in Mogadishu. That’s all they wrote. British broadcasters were far more responsible and were led by Jon Snow […]
Inside Out – May 06
Those of you who have climbed the final flight of stairs to our Frontline Forum will have seen three photographs of journalists on display. It’s an undeclared wall of honour recognising three outstanding journalists among the terrible toll that Richard Sambrook writes about this month. Kurt Schork was an exemplary American journalist admired not only […]
Inside Out – April 06
Dear Frontline Readers, A small group of us from The Frontline Club retreated recently to Vaughan Smith’s family enclave, Ellingham Hall in Norfolk, to think, among other things, imaginatively about how to build on the dramatic success of the Forum and produce a more thoughtful and challenging series of programmes. One of the things we […]