War words
Frontline: reporting from the world’s deadliest places
A newly revised and updated edition of Frontline by David Loyn was published this week. The acclaimed book chronicles the work of the Frontline news agency, founded by journalists Rory Peck, Peter Jouvenal, Vaughan Smith and Nicholas Della Casa. First published in 2005, the latest edition features a foreword from BBC world affairs editor John […]
Oliver Poole gets reverse culture shock
Oliver Poole, author of Into the Red Zone and Daily Telegraph foreign correspondent, talked to students in Oxford earlier this week. Snippets of his chat appear in Cherwell and he talks about that oddest of feelings of reverse culture shock felt by many war correspondents when they head back home, “Once I began to live […]
From warzone to psychiatrist
Paul Watson’s book Where war lives is reviewed on the Bloomberg site. Watson, who started out as a metro reporter on the Toronto Star, took his holidays in war zones. He ended up reporting from Eritrea, Angola, Somalia, Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan receiving the Pulitzer prize for his “Black Hawk Down” picture of a mob […]
Women in war
UALR Public radio tells the stories of five women in five different wars. The audio broadcast begins with a female war reporter, Carolin Emcke is a war correspondent and the author of “Echoes of Violence: Letters from a War Reporter.” She tells Steve Paulson that what war survivors ask for most often is the chance […]
Chris Wattie talks Afghanistan
Chris Wattie, National Post senior national reporter and author of Contact Charlie: The Canadian Army, The Taliban and the Battle that Saved Afghanistan, talks about time in Kandahar with Canadian soldiers, In an enlightening interview, Wattie describes his experience in combat with Canadian soldiers, and tells the stories that most Canadians haven’t heard. He discusses […]
Addicted to danger
The Daily Mail publishes extracts from Ann Leslie’s Killing My Own Snakes this week. The veteran foreign correspondent talks about the addiction to danger she sees in other war correspondents and which she has experienced herself, To be a professional war correspondent means, in my view, that you have to be a certain type of […]
Ugly of war
John D. McHugh, Frontline Club member and regular in these parts, has his latest short film from Afghanistan up on The Guardian website. He to a member of a the US army Medevac team about the day to day job of helping the wounded and the dying. John says he has a lot more footage […]
Into Danger
Katie Adie promotes her new book Into Danger, which was published yesterday, in The Telegraph. She discusses why people like her choose to go to war and other dangerous places to work, One of the questions I am frequently asked is: ”What is the most dangerous thing that’s happened to you?” But I find it […]
Back to Vietnam
Ruth Ann Burns became the youngest accredited Vietnam war correspondent when she stepped off a plane to get her papers stamped in Saigon aged just 20 years old. Her husband Carl Burns was an Army helicopter pilot. The two of them chronicle their war stories, together with submissions from other soldiers, in a book of […]
Dealing with psychological shrapnel
Katie Adie is interviewed in The Times this weekend and answers the age old question, War correspondents are often portrayed as psychologically damaged men who’ve looked into the heart of darkness and found sanctuary in booze. How does a woman who has walked through the human abattoir of history, from geno-cide in Rwanda to slaughter […]
How things used to be
[video:youtube:9aF_r_01ekY] In this video blog, NBC’s Mike Taibbi talks to John Rich, the only war correspondent to cover the entire Korean War. link
Butterfly mind
Vue Weekly reviews Patrick Brown’s latest tome, a memoir called Butterfly Mind. Brown worked as a foreign correspondent for CBC for 30 years and he admits he often didn’t know an awful lot about the places he was parachuted into and expected to become an overnight expert, “Although my tone implied deep understanding of complex […]
Daily Mirror Palestine war diaries published
The memoires of Barbara Board, a Daily Mirror reporter for ten years, are to be published by her daughter Jacqueline in a new book, Reporting From Palestine. Barbara worked as Daily Mirror’s frontline war correspondent from Palestine in the 40’s and 50’s, “It was fascinating to discover everything she had done as a female reporter […]
15 months of reporting
[video:youtube:N3_ZKBwv3V0] Mike Boettcher, ex-CNN, NBC, Peabody award winning journalist, is heading to Iraq and Afghanistan to report on the soldier’s stories. He’ll be out there for 15 months and will file all his work to the web on a site called NoIgnoring. He says he’ll make all the material free for news networks to use […]
Scottish war reporter serialised
All Media Scotland begin publishing a series of extracts from the memoirs of Scottish war correspondent, Paul Harris today. The book, ‘More Thrills than Skills: A Half-life in Journalism’, is scheduled for publication in 2009, I’d always wanted to be a journalist. I can remember exactly what inspired this bizarre deep inner-longing. Around the age […]
Live tonight: Philip Gourevitch on Iraq
Download this episode View in iTunes You can now view the event here. Philip Gourevitch, author, journalist and longtime staff writer of the New Yorker will be talking about Iraq, Abu Ghraib and his most recent book, Standard Operating Procedure, with the journalist Nick Fielding at the Frontline Club tonight. More details on the event […]
War reporting cost me my marriage
Richard Engel talks to VOA News about his work as a war reporter for NBC and the toll it has taken on his personal life. Engel says his job cost him his marriage. He was recently promoted to the position of NBC Chief Foreign correspondent and he is based in Beirut. He also released a […]
Reporting the red zone
The New York Observer begins a week of reports, called Reporting the Red Zone, focussing on the lives of journalists stationed in Baghdad, “It’s the oft-stated phrase that truth is the first casualty of war,†said Michael Ware, CNN’s Baghdad correspondent, on the telephone from Iraq. “In this war, as in every other conflict, everybody […]
How the soldier repairs the gramophone
BBC journalist Allan Little talks to Sasa Stanisic, author of How the soldier repairs the gramophone – the English translation of which arrives in bookshops tomorrow – and remembers the day the war arrived in the town of Visegrad, on the River Drina, which separates Bosnia from Serbia, I and countless other western reporters ran […]
The thin line
Peter Calamai from the Toronto Star reflects upon reporting from war zones and how 25 years ago newspapers were far more reluctant to use the photographs they publish today. At the end of it all, what was the point? What was the purpose of all this journalistic effort? We bore witness to man’s continuing inhumanity […]
Portrait of a fixer – Daoud Hari in Darfur
Daoud Hari, author of The Translator, is profiled in the Daily Telegraph during a book promotion trip to New York. After his village in Darfur was attacked by Janjaweed militia he took to helping NGOs and foreign journalists get the story out. He became a fixer. ‘The journalists were very different from the NGO people,’ […]
Declan Walsh in Garmser
The Guardian’s Declan Walsh reports from Garmser, on the frontline of the fight with the Taliban in Afghanistan via audio slideshow on the newspaper’s website.
Who is Asne Seierstad?
Stephen Moss asks the question – Who is Asne Seierstad? A journalist, a writer, or something inbetween? Maybe a “literary journalist” he argues, The nomenclature matters. I met the American reporter Dahr Jamail, author of Beyond the Green Zone, recently, and while I admired the way he had gone to Baghdad to report on the […]
Kimberley Dozier breathing fire
Kimberley Dozier is interviewed on the Bob Rivers show. She recalls the day she almost died when a roadside bomb exploded in Baghdad. Kimberley took part in the recent Frontline Club event in New York. Her book, “Breathing the Fire: Fighting to Report and Survive the War in Iraq”, has just been published.
Ahmed Ali’s story
Bloomberg take a look at the story behind the story of Oliver Poole’s new book the Red Zone. The Daily Telegraph journalist spent five years in Iraq. In the book he pays tribute to the fixer who helped him along the way, a man called Ahmed Ali. Ali eventually fled to the Atlanta by way […]
Anthony Loyd on Another Bloody Love Letter
Anthony Loyd, Times war correspondent, Frontline Club member and frequent speaker at club events, is interviewed in Metro about his most recent book, Another Bloody Love Letter. The book concentrates on his experiences covering the Balkans, Afghanistan, Sierra Leone and Iraq and he questions what it is to be a reporter during war and how […]
The diary of John D. McHugh
More from our man in Afghanistan. Actually, the Guardian’s paying for his tea and biscuits and not us. However, he is the winner of the inaugural Frontline Club Award for Journalism and that’s good enough for this blog. John D. McHugh’s latest update for his Guardian diary is now live and it appears IT is […]
Jonathan Steele reads Defeat
Jonathan Steele, senior foreign correspondent for The Guardian, reads from his latest book Defeat: Why America and Britain Lost Iraq for NPR, In the new book Defeat: Why America and Britain Lost Iraq, Jonathan Steele dissects the war and explains how it could have been fought — and planned — more successfully. This reading of […]
Hello pal
I suppose email scams are as much of a cultural record as anything else. Sgt Jarvis was thoughtful enough to send me this message today: Hello Pal, I do hope my email meet you in good health. I am Staff Sgt. Jarvis Maxwell Reeves Jr. a U.S. helicopter maintenance supervisor in the 3rd Infantry Division, […]
I lost my love in Baghdad
The Cleveland Plain Dealer reviews Michael Hastings book, I lost my love in Baghdad. Hastings was posted to the Iraqi capital to work out of the Newsweek bureau there. His girlfiend, Andi, was later killed there. Janet Okoben’s review in the Cleveland newspaper is less than complimentary, After his first 10-week reporting stint is up, […]