Journalism
Yuri Bagrov profiled
Former Chechen war reporter Yuri Bagrov is profiled in the New York Times today. Bagrov worked in Grozny disguising himself as a Russian soldier at one point so that he could report from the frontline in Grozny. His reports didn’t go down well with Russian authorities and he was stripped of citizenship in 2005. Now, […]
Digital war reporting
Three very interesting links come our way this week. First up, Kings of War leads us to the New Media and the Warfighter report from a Center for Strategic leadership workshop. The report concludes, New media as a means to achieve strategic information effects is an integral part of today’s military operating environment. link Meanwhile, […]
John D McHugh blogging from Afghanistan
Frontline Club member John D McHugh is heading back to Afghanistan. This will be the third April he’s spent over there. The first almost killed him, the second went an awful lot smoother. He talked at length about his first trip, along with his photographs at the club in 2007. This time John has a […]
Dealing with trauma
Jackie Cameron writes about the trauma suffered by journalists reporting war in the Sunday Herald today. Cameron is a former journalist who retrained as an occupational psychologist when she decided to look into the effect of trauma on frontline journalists, As Dr Jo Rick, a leading trauma researcher based at the IWP, explains, war is […]
Pidgeons in Zimbabwe
Peter Cave in Johannesburg talks on Correspondents Report, an ABC Radio National programme, about how journalists get the story out of difficult spots like Zimbabwe. Pidgeons appear to be the key, Often the only way to get a story out of a difficult spot was to use a Pidgeon – a tourist, diplomat or even […]
The Foreign Correspondent in 2013
You’ve got until 2013. At the Media Re:Public conference in Los Angeles last month Solana Larsen threw out this provocative statement, In 2013, there will be no foreign correspondents link Or rather… not foreign correspondents as we have known them. We’ve discussed a possible future for them before – basically one that is economically feasible, […]
Bob Woodruff wins Pearl Award
On the back of winning a Peabody last week, Bob Woodruff has just been announced the winner of the Daniel Pearl Award for Courage and Integrity in Journalism. Woodruff works for ABC and was seriously injured in a roadside bomb in Iraq in January, 2006, “We couldn’t find a more deserving recipient of this award […]
Journalism is a dangerous business
[video:youtube:gkrOK3sfWpE]Foreign correspondent of the year 2008
The British Press Awards have just announced that Ghaith Abdul-Ahad has won Foreign Correspondent of the year for 2008. Ghaith works for the Guardian newsaper and is a regular at the Frontline Club having taken part in the first club event in New York. Frontline Club members have a good record in the Foreign Correspondent […]
Pulitzer prize winners 2008
The Pulitzer prizes were announced last night. Among the winners are Steve Fainaru, from the Washington Post, who receives the prize for International Reporting for his reports on private security contractors operating in Iraq. Also, Reuters Bangkok senior snapper Adrees Latif wins the prize for Breaking news photography for his images of Japanese video journalist […]
Michael Kelly’s widow reflects
Michael Kelly was the first American journalist to be killed covering the war in Iraq. He worked as a columnist for the Washington Post and the Atlantic Monthly. Last week marked the fifth anniversary of his death. His family reflect upon his death and their loss in his local Mineral Wells Index newspaper, “I wish […]
“A very poor choice of career”
War reporter Matt McAllester gave a talk to students at Stony Brook University in New York last week, McAllester said being a foreign correspondent meant never stopping. He said that when journalists are covering dangerous situations, they have to ask themselves, “Am I prepared to die for this?” “It is dumb. It’s a stupid job… […]
“No shame, no blame”
Writing on the Huffington Post Greg Mitchell, Editor of Editor & Publisher and author of the recent book “So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits and the President Failed on Iraq” goes over the media failings in the run up to Iraq and during the conflict, It’s as if the war had […]
Newseum receives Laos remains
According to Richard Pyle at the Associated Press a time capsule consisting of the remains of war photographers shot down over Laos during the Vietnam war will be preserved in a time capsule at the Newseum in Washington D.C. “museum devoted to the history and practice of journalism,” Ten years ago this week, a U.S. […]
How can I have been so stupid?
The Boston Globe talks to four war reporters about how it feels to face danger and the distinct possibility of death in the line of reporting wars. Here’s LA Times reporter and present day Caribbean bureau chief Carol J. Williams on her experiences in the war zones of Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq, When I’ve […]
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 do not have access to […]
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 grasp several media trends at a […]
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. Most prefer to run with stories […]
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 with the Taliban. Here are the […]
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 double check, and I hate to […]
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 of cameo moments and lives […]
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 tells of the personal toll, […]
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 dangerous war ever for journalists […]
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 reporter covering local stories in […]
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 2008, Obtaining reliable information is […]
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 newspapers get the search engine […]
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.
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 Journalism’s survey of news coverage. […]
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 than 23 years combined experience reporting […]
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 famed for his Spanish Civil […]