Continue reading »]]> At an age where anybody can take pictures and videos and everybody, with the sole global exception of my mother, can upload and broadcast materials from their own living room (or indeed, bedroom), to anybody who cares to watch, the borders between journalists and sources tend to blur. This subject has been addressed here before, but recent events have brought it back to our attention.

The Arab Spring provided a vast platform for citizen’s journalism, especially in Egypt, where despite massive media presence, there was a hunger for information from the ground – from the sitdowns at Tahrir Square to localised events that could only be caught on an activist’s camera.

The appetite for citizen-produced material from Syria derived from simpler realities. Foreign journalists simply can not stay in Syria for long or operate there freely. They often have to rely on photos, snippets, videos and bits of information recorded at great personal risk by local sources. This information, either delivered in person or posted via social media or other online vehicles, fed quite a few reports on global media outlets.

The contribution of such evidence to the atrocities taking place in Syria is immense, and the people who put their lives on the line capturing and posting such proof deserve our admiration. They also deserve to be paid for the fruit of their efforts if it gets used by established media. But all this does not make them, necessarily, journalists. This, of course, does not apply only to “citizen journalists” in Egypt or Syria, but everywhere. They are sources, eyewitnesses, commentators; they are essential for journalism to take place, but in order for their contributions to turn into journalism, two things need to be brought forward, verification and context.

In the last few months there have been more and more complaints from journalists regarding “forged” or “biased” visual and textual material posted online. Pictures said to have been taken in Homs were in fact taken elsewhere in Syria. Edited videos from different places in the world make stories seem different to what they are; governments and other interested bodies are paying for “citizen journalists” to post material. Many activists engage in journalism, and while all journalists are also citizens who have the right to take a stand on their country’s future, their double role as journalists and activists sometimes blurs the lines between the two. Naturally, the actions of some should not implicate all. The problem in the concept of ‘citizen journalism’ is not in the good or bad intentions of its practitioners, but in the scrutiny to which their materials are subjected to before being aired.

More and more evidence indicates Saudi funding for Syrian activists releasing information. Does it make this information wrong? Certainly not, but transparency is of the essence and verification is vital. Activists have the right to have their say as much as governments, but knowing where a piece of information originates from is necessary in the quest to validate it. More and more NGOs are becoming news providers, relying on sources on the ground. Many of them mean well. Others intentions are blurry. But there are ways to add this information up, follow it through, cross source and get to the facts. This is the journalist’s job, as it always has been.

Established media has its own mechanisms of verification and it is exposed to public review and to libel suits. This does not necessarily prevent cases of severe misconduct such as that being gradually revealed in the News International scandal. But still, the rules of professional behavior are set, the ethos is there and breaking it has consequences. Newspapers, websites and broadcasters’ credibility are their main assets, and they have a vested interest in protecting that by meeting their obligations when it comes to verifying materials and putting them in context.

At the same time, it is private people around the world who in recent years have been constantly delivering immensely important untold stories from under-covered corners of the world, or from the under-covered corners of well covered stories. Human rights organisations giving cameras to people around the world made a vital contribution which enabled the voiceless to be heard,  seen and to expose wrongs committed against them. Individuals taking charge of documenting their own stories found a way around the established news agenda straight to the hearts and minds of world public opinion, sometimes harnessing masses around the world to demand change. Yet, there’s a line between participation in the international information free-market, and journalism.

New kind of services in the media market are presenting an interesting attempt to bridge the gap. Storyful.com offers verification services by a team of professional journalists, and explain their ethos and modus operandi in their interesting blog at http://blog.storyful.com/

Is this the future of journalism? Teams of professionals picking up the clues and evidence spread around the World Wide Web by global citizens? That’s a challenging prospect for everybody involved in journalism. The old way of professionals sniffing at ‘amateurs’ is not going to cut it. Especially with 10 million active Twitter accounts in the UK alone today and counting. We should embrace the wealth of information streaming constantly our way, but it is our job, as ever, to provide the mechanisms for creating real journalism out of it. Picking the fresh trail, following it to its sources, verifying it and giving it context. In this sense, all is new, yet nothing is new, under the sun.

What do you think? Share your thoughts with our community.

By: Daphna Baram and Mais Al-Baya’a.

Continue reading »]]> Live broadcast, by its nature, has its funny moments, whether in studio or out in the field. Equipment not working, mics that should be off suddenly coming to life, props collapsing, or wild animals breaking into the frame, and it is all hilarious, as long as it happens to another reporter or another broadcaster.

All reporters have their own stories of embarrassing/funny/slightly humiliating moments on air. The ones I can remember are an Israeli radio morning news anchor trying to crack a joke on the morning after the Olympic bid by asking me, at 7am London time, “so, which pub in east London are you in now, Daphna Baram?” to which I replied far too candidly “I’m in my east London bed, Gabi”. 15 minutes later the 7/7 bombings hit, but my phone did not ring again. Clearly Israeli broadcasters realised that they’d disturbed my sleep quite enough for one morning.

Another day I was called into the Al Jazeera studios in London to commentate on the case of an Israeli citizen who was charged with rape on the premise that he had misled his alleged victim regarding his identity by claiming he was Jewish. I was picnicking with friends on Hampstead Heath when the call came in, and said I’ll oblige if they pick me up and give me a shirt to replace the rather scruffy vest I had on. Once I was whisked into the Knightsbridge studio, a young employee jumped me, put me in a chair, and said “you are on in 30 seconds”. When I reminded her of the shirt business she sized me up rather scornfully and said “all the shirts we have here are for our presenters. Have you seen them? None of them is over size 8”. A make up artist who rushed in managed to comb some of the hay out of my hair during countdown, but I’m sure a few viewers that day were wondering who’s the hobo.

At GRNLive we often find ourselves trying to coordinate a hit while avoiding (or not) a catastrophe in the making. On the day of Muamar Gadhafi’s death one of our biggest clients managed to secure a satellite feed point for a short amount of time. We managed to find our correspondent who miraculously was staying at the same hotel as the feedpoint. The reporter did not know where in the hotel the studio was, and we were struggling to find out. All that could be heard in GRNLive’s offices was Mais shouting into the phone “Just run! RUN!” as the correspondent ran along the hotel’s corridors, desperately looking for the right door while trying to get her lipstick on. The time slot was coming to an end and we had been watching the television screen desperately, when to our relief our reporter suddenly emerged on screen all prim, if breathless, and delivered a perfect account of events.

In Tbilisi in 2008, during the Russian invasion, we had a call from one of our clients asking if we could kindly ask our correspondent to “keep her hair tied back next time she goes on camera”. It transpired that the correspondent was reporting from an exposed outdoor feedpoint, and her hair kept flying into her face. While I was making the hair-design consultancy phone call Mais was watching the video and assessing the magnitude of the disaster. “It did look a bit like an episode of Desperate Housewives” she concluded.

The gaffs are not always coming from the correspondent’s end. The studio often provides its own mess-ups. One of our correspondents in Baghdad before the fall of the city, was asked by a news anchor whether the female minder assigned to him was attractive. The reporter, taken by surprise by the audacity of the question, went mute for a few long seconds.

YouTube offers a large selection of awkward and funny news moments, collected mishaps, assorted on-air accidents, angry reporters following misunderstandings with studio, racist gaffs and hiccups that are the result of slightly blue minded anchors.

After spending an afternoon of chuckles in the office reminiscing and watching broadcast glitches, we decided to declare GRNLive’s correspondents funny moments competition. Tell us about yours, attach a video or audio if you have them (but tell us the story anyway), and the best story (chosen by the impartial light minded GRNLive team) will win an iPod Touch (terribly useful for shooting footage and recording audio, among other things). Don’t be shy – a giggle shared is a giggle multiplied!

Continue reading »]]> Being a foreign correspondent is a fascinating job, which many desiderate. You get to be the envy of the people back home, in a foreign land that becomes a new home to you, at least for a while. You get to watch history unfold, and furthermore, you get to have an influence on how it gets told. You get to have your fingerprints on the words and images that could shape a generation’s memory of dramatic events and their perception of a country, a people, a revolution, a disaster.

But it can be a very frustrating job too. The levels of frustration involved often have to do with the extent to which you really can do all the above mentioned things, within the editorial confinements imposed on you from the office back home. How free you are to tell the story the way you see it, or to tell it at all sometimes, would depend on many variables.

If you work as a staffer for a big media organisation, it would have something to do with your length of service, experience and reputation, and on your ability to work the internal editorial policy back home. All of those are things you could hardly use when reporting as a freelance for a newspaper or a broadcaster where you do not know your commissioning editors or the people in the studio or at editing table, who will be in charge of which parts of your story the audience gets to view, and in what packaging.

There are trends and fashions in news, just like in anything else. The Middle East is in, Africa is out; natural disasters in, corruption rendered boring. Foreign correspondents develop a dark, grim and cynical sense of humour around this reality. “Black people killing each other still does not interest anybody, unless half of them are Muslim”, a war-beaten reporter said to me recently. And still, this week we’ve registered zero interest from clients regarding the growing tension between Sudan and South Sudan.

“Oh now they want to know” is a common response among correspondents when a story hits the fan, which is, more often than not, when the bodies are starting to pile up and an atrocity is no longer reversible. They feel they’ve been watching the catastrophe looming for weeks, months, sometimes years. But the big media only get interested once the story culminated into uncontrollable violence, biblical famine or unstoppable plague which has finally reached the West, or at the very least, Western people.

A social story pitched from afar by a reporter often invokes a yawn in the editor’s room. However the whole world witnessed last year what one street vendor, Mouhamed Bouazizi, setting himself on fire in protest against social injustice invoked in Tunisia, and how the flames his tortured body burned in had spread across the whole Middle East.  Almost any movement for political change; any revolution, coup, protest which captured the attention of millions around the world, had its source in a social grievance, health deprivation, hunger, discrimination. Many reporters watch those seeds of big stories grow and spread, but their stories remain untold until their time comes, if it ever does.

As a news agency committed to two main ideas – meeting the demands of broadcasters for breaking news coverage promptly with the most professional reporting, and making sure correspondents get paid for their work – at GRNLive we often find it hard to help correspondents with such difficulties. We put those stories on our news alert, or try to chat to our clients about them, but at the end of the day, we are not the commissioners; we can not influence the news agendas of our clients, nor do we try to do so.

What we can do is broaden our presentation window. Today we have decided we have what it takes to offer all our correspondents a platform to air those stories, and hopefully convince our clients that those are stories worth commissioning. Tell us your untold story, whether as an article, news item or feature, which we will run as a guest blog, or as a podcast, scripted video, or news package, all of which we will put on display on our YouTube channel. Another option is to have a Skype two-way with us which will serve as a demonstration Q&A on our YouTube channel and website. Get in touch with us at editor@grnlive.com and we will schedule a Skype meeting and make it happen.

Join our conversation: what stories, past and present, from your current base, do you feel are being missed or were missed in the past? Has justice been done to them? Was it too late. Share your own story. Let’s try to get it the treatment it deserves.

Continue reading »]]> Today I interviewed Sunday Telegraph foreign correspondent Nick Meo as part of our GRNLive Interviews series. Nick has reported for GRNLive from Egypt, Libya, Norway and anywhere else his work sent him over the last few years. It was a very interesting and enjoyable conversation for me and hopefully for those of you who watch it.

GRNLive’s Matt Cooksey and myself also got ourselves a bonus tour of the Telegraph’s swanky offices in Victoria. Newspapers headquarters, was my conclusion, remembering the Guardian’s state-of-the-art Kings Place offices too – are looking more and more like swish shopping malls.

One of the subjects we touched on was something that has been on my mind for a long time. To what extent are we, as journalists, influenced in our coverage by our ability to identify with the people we cover. Identify not merely in feeling their pain, but mainly in seeing them as similar to us, in being able to imagine ourselves in their shoes. And to what extent does this ability to identify influence our readers and viewers?

I was drawn back to those questions when Nick mentioned covering the shootings and bombings carried out by Anders Breivik in Norway last July and the experience of covering it. Nick mentioned his admiration of the “calm” and “cool” way in which the Norwegians dealt with the horror of the tragedy that had hit them. He mentioned, by way of contrast, the “emotional” response of people in the Middle East to tragedy. There was nothing remotely dismissive in his attitude to either people, but, being English, it was clear who were easier for him to identify with.

I had similar, yet opposite, conversations in the past with Middle Eastern journalists, who were surprised, almost dismayed, by the ‘chin up and stiff upper lip’ British response to calamity of any magnitude (except, naturally, to the death of a princess). “What is the matter with those people”, said an Egyptian journalist in July 2005, shortly after the 7/7 bombings in London, “Why is being calm and orderly more important to them than expressing their feelings?”

I had a different question. Why is it that after a few days of silence, the masses were not out protesting over the fact that the lists of the dead and missing had not yet been made public. I knew very well that in Israel, where I come from, this would not have been tolerated.

Watching the footage from the 9/11 bombings streaming from New York in my office in Jerusalem in September 2001, I remember beginning to wonder, after a few hours, where were the cameras in the hospitals, greeting the injured as they come in and chasing family members around as they come to enquire after the fate of missing loved ones.

That was how suicide bombings were covered in Israel, a society with a very flimsy sense for boundaries and personal space, and I assumed the US media was similar. It made me conclude that it was all down to difficulties of moving around New York City on the day. Later, I realised that legal, as well as cultural, reasons prohibited this particular type of journo-voyeurism.

In our conversation, Nick Meo described two interviews he conducted with bereaved families; one in Libya, the other in Norway. While completely different in their culture of mourning, in the circumstances of their loss and in their way of life, he felt that this was the essence of the work of a journalist – getting people, fellow human beings, to take you in and share an intolerable experience they went through. He felt both families shared a difficulty, not only in coming to terms with the loss of a son, but also in talking about their pain, sharing it with a stranger.

“When you are a parent – a child is a child is a child”, an English colleague once echoed to me the words of my own mother. But I remained dubious; not about the equality of all children, but about the treatment they get in the Western media when they die in violent circumstances.

Does the Harry Potter-reading Nintendo-playing iPhone-owning child really not hit a stronger cord in the heart of the journalist covering his loss than the child shepherding the goats in a far and dusty land? And if so, what could bridge the gap?

In 2003 I put that question to Ian Katz, the then editor of the Guardian’s daily magazine, G2. He said something that stayed in my mind for a long time. Ian explained that in an effort to help readers identify with foreign news protagonists in different cultures, his paper endeavours to find local middle class writers and interviewees. In this context he mentioned the Iraqi blogger Salam Pax, whose blog was carried by the Guardian during the war. A few years later, GRNLive correspondent and Guardian regular Saeed Kamali Deghgan, played, and still plays, a similar role covering Iran’s post-elections protests; first from Iran, and later from London. Saeed is middle class, openly gay, hip and savvy in Western popular culture; he quickly became a household name for news consumers.

Another important, possibly crucial, contribution is made by the fact that nowadays the camera’s lens, and the reporting eye, is not directed only one way. More and more international broadcasters are non-European, and so are their reporters.

At the same time many non-European and non-American journalists are joining the ranks of Western media (though in a surprisingly, and in my opinion disappointingly, long and slow process). It is no longer “us” watching “them”; “they” are watching “us” too, and offering alternative outlooks and narratives and creating a richer and more challenging news environment.

Click to see the whole Nick Meo Interview

Continue reading »]]> The Trial of Norwegian mass-murderer Anders Breivik, who killed, by his own admission, 77 people in a well planned attack, stirred an extensive debate about different aspects of its media coverage. Some commentators have gone as far as to say that Breivik should not be put on trial at all, as it would enable him to publicly make his case and preach his radical right wing ideology. Many objected to giving a racist murderer a platform to preach his ideas.

Sunday Telegraph’s Foreign Correspondent Nick Meo, who reported from the gory scene in July 2011 and returned to Oslo this week to meet the bereaved families, said today in an interview with GRN that the families were concerned that the trial would “turn into a circus”. “There are many like minded radical right wing people in Norway and across Europe,” said Meo, “there’s a worry that Breivik will inspire them”.

Indeed, in the hours that passed ever since the trial began Breivik introduced his fascist-racist ideology, explain that his deed was aimed as a “preventive strike” against his country’s multicultural policies. He accused his victims of “deconstructing” Norway’s traditional cultural identity. He expressed no regret and said he’d do it all over again, given the chance. His defence has is being extensively covered by media vehicles around the world, and journalists are constantly tweeting from the Oslo court as the trial unfolds. Some even protested against the very idea of turning Breivik into a ”celebrity”, as if television exposure of any nature is in itself some kind of a prize.

In an interesting coincidence today, Wednesday 18 April 2012, is the first day in which parts of a trial in the UK is being broadcast on television. In a country where it has not been allowed so far to even take stills photos in court, and where the old tradition of court sketches has been thriving well into the 21^st century, this is nothing short of a revolution. Scottish Television STV broadcasts today the sentencing of David Gilroy for the murder of his former mistress Suzanne Pilley, after the Scottish broadcaster was granted permission to record the conclusion to the murder case.

This precedes a new UK legislation allowing courtroom proceedings to be televised, which is expected to be announced in the Queen’s speech next month. The BBC, ITN and Sky News called on Prime Minister David Cameron to push through the legislation in a joint letter sent in February this year.

Arguments against cameras in UK courts, apart from the tendency to adhere to “traditions”, concentrate on the danger of turning courts into an arena of reality TV, and enabling public voyeurism into the lives of victims and defendants alike.

The idea of not only not reporting the Breivik trial, but not holding it at all, is a radical manifestation of the perception according to which public exposure is a prize to its protagonist, more than a question of public interest, and that three democratic values – the right to an open and fair trial, the public’s right to know and the freedom of expression – should all be disregarded in order to prevent Breivik’s abhorrent thoughts from being aired. But those who argue for suppressing the procedure are ignoring the question that keeps coming up as the leading notion in any discussion about journalism today: context.

A criminal trial is a procedure in which the court as an organ of society as a whole expresses its dismay at the alleged acts of a group or individual. Breivik making racist statements in his own defence and attacking his own country for its democracy and tolerance is not the same as Breivik voicing the same idea in a speech to the nation. The very trial is an act in which not only his deeds, but also his justification of them, are being judged, and in all evidence, are to be found criminal and condemnable, and he himself to be found guilty of the murdering of 77 people upon his own admission, supported by endless evidence. The fact that his radical statements are made to justify the murder of 77 of his fellow compatriots, most of them teenagers – a crime which had sent shockwaves of horror across Europe and beyond – is hardly going to give those ideas any credence. If anything, it embodies a public lesson at what kind of heinous and evil deeds such ideas of racism and intolerance might invoke.

Those ideas indeed have supporters in every society, and Breivik’s new fans might get further inspired. But this kind of thoughts are far more dangerous when explored in the darkness of solitary rooms, on neo-fascist websites and without any demonstration of their consequences, than when they are scrutinised in an open court, in the presence of their victims and secondary victims, the bereaved families. They are more harmful when being whispered from mouth to ear and sworn allegiances to in clandestine meetings, then they are when publicly declared harmful and unforgivable by the media and the court of law.

The Nuremberg Trials of 1946 gave the biggest Nazi criminals caught alive an opportunity to defend themselves against the allegations brought against them of crimes against humanity. Thousands of journalists covered the trials, which historically turned into one of the most powerful vehicle for exposing and condemning the crimes of the Nazi regime. Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem opened a new era as far as the understanding of the horrors of the holocaust were concerned. Criticism has been voiced at both those trials for being “show trials”, but neither has been accused of being responsible for raising support of Nazism due to the fact the defendants were allowed to answer the allegations.

Very few have sympathy to the man Breivik, but the right for open and just trials is not saved for likeable defendants. A society is tested by its treatment of those it finds most objectionable. If Breivik would have been denied a fair and public trial, he could have claimed success in his pledge to undermine democracy in his own homeland.

Another point concerning context has been raised in a debate concerning reporters twitter feeds from court. As Index of Censorship says today, despite the prosecutions explanation: “We don’t want his testimony to be directly broadcast because it needs to be digested after being put in context by media organisations”, many journalists have been tweeting feeds out of Breivik ‘s testimony. The limitations of twitter – 140 characters at a time – naturally prevent the journalists from putting his statements in context. The way Twitter works in turn enables other users to re-tweet the statements and use them to promote their own ideas.

Index reports that reporters dealt with the context question in different ways. Paul Brannan, tweeting for Al-Jazeera English, kept explaining the situation to his readers in tweets like: “*IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER* I am tweeting the evidence directly. I do not vouch for whether what #Breivik is saying is true.” Guardian correspondent Helen Pidd opted not to tweet all Breivik’s comments saying some of them were just

too heartless. She said she will “put it in context in a story at lunchtime” as it “seems irresponsible to just put it out on Twitter unadulterated.”

The growing competition for speed in reporting forces context to chase breathlessly after the succinct reporting enforced by technology. But not many news consumers seem to be happy to confine themselves to skinny uncontextualised feeds. At the end of the day (often, literally) most of us turn to the media we know and trust to make sense of things, be it our favourite evening news channel, the website of our newspaper of choice, or the news wrap on the radio in the car. It seems that in the times of economical concentrated communications, the ability to speak fast and short as events unfold holds within it a journalistic commitment to expand and explain; a picture might be worth a 1000 words, but we are not exempt from saying them, or at least as many of them that are required to give news consumers a bigger picture. Anybody can tweet a quotation out a defendant’s mouth but only professional journalists who do their job well can add the institutional relevant knowledge, the understanding of the procedure and the relevant event history that give a report its real value.

Continue reading »]]> Guardian Media reports today that human rights activists in Bahrain are calling on the BBC and Sky to boycott the Formula 1 race planned to take place in the country on 22 April.

Zainab al-Khawaja, daughter of hunger striking imprisoned activist Abdulhadi al-Khawaja, told the Guardian “If the Formula One does come to Bahrain, despite calls from the Bahraini people and activists for it to be cancelled, then we would like to see that there are people supporting our cause, and who would not broadcast this race.”

She explained: “Bringing Formula One, putting all these ads everywhere, celebration, celebration, celebration, while people are suffocating in their villages from teargas, while a marcher dies just two weeks ago and while my father is dying in a military hospital is just sending the message to the people of Bahrain that nothing has changed.”

The BBC said they were abiding by their contractual commitments but were keeping in touch with *** and “monitoring the situation closely”. Sky have not commented.

The way in which questionable regimes use sporting events to achieve international legitimacy has been a subject of scrutiny since ancient times. Roman satirist Juvenal coined the phrase “bread and circuses” (aka “bread and games”) in the second century AD to describe gladiator fights and similar entertainment events designed to distract public attention from political corruption and difficulties at the battlefields.

The phrase was adopted by dissidents throughout history to complain over shallow distractions of public opinion by the governing elites. It was used by Russian revolutionaries (“bread and spectacles”) and Spanish republicans (“bread and bullfights”).

Almost a century before Bahrain’s Royals came up with their version of “pita bread and fast cars” the world had the first live-broadcasted Olympic Games, those of Berlin 1936, supervised closely by Führer Adolf Hitler. The games were a huge propaganda platform for Nazi Germany, but Hitler’s hope that they would establish the superiority of “Aryan” athletes was thrown to the gutter by black US athlete Jesse Owens.

The photos and footage of  Owens breaking his records and of Hitler refusing to shake his hands were so effective that they are still engraved in the minds of people who were born decades after the 1936 Olympics has taken place. They remained in collective memory as moments in which a truth was exposed; Just as Nazi director Leni Riefensthal’s film Olimpya, selectively documenting the same events, is remembered as an icon of deceitful propaganda.

Being in Nazi ruled Berlin for the Olympics enabled journalists to expose some of the early atrocities of the Nazi regime and bring them to public awareness not just by the very merit of being in Germany, but also because the world was tuned to the country because of the Olympics, and wanted to know more about it.

In Argentina people argue to this very day over the crucial question – did the fact that the country hosted, and won, the football World Cup of 1978 prolong Jorge Vidale’s dictatorship, or prompt its timely demise. It certainly seems to have deepened the complacency of some Argentineans and deepened their wish to remain oblivious to the atrocities of the ruling junta.

The Olympic Games in China drew a certain interest towards human right protestors and atrocious human rights’ violations in the country, but at the end of the day China had much more to gain from the intense media coverage of the games than it had to lose. Its status as a major mega-player in world markets and politics was almost officially launched at the opening ceremony, in front of millions of wide eyed viewers worldwide.

There’s no doubt that covering a popular sporting event could make a broadcaster an accomplice, to an extent, in helping a regime redeem itself. But an enhanced media presence and a lime light directed at it also gives a priceless political opportunity to the opposition of such a regime, both at home and abroad. Their determination and courage could help them hijack the international attention and harness it to their cause.

At the end of the day it is all down to the broadcaster/newspaper, the editor and the individual reporter. Journalists who ignore the context in which the race is taking place would be betraying their profession. Covering the race without mentioning the protest is unthinkable. But avoiding coverage altogether is not the answer. Projecting more light, rather than pulling a plug and shrouding a situation in darkness, is what journalism is all about.

Continue reading »]]> Simone de Beauvoir famously said “One is not born a woman, one becomes one”. Recently I’ve heard a veteran editor paraphrase the very opposite about news reporters. “Either you are it or you are not. News reporters are a species”, she said.

The remark was made flippantly but I remembered having similar thoughts when I used to recruit news reporters back in Jerusalem in the late 1990s – early 2000s. We were a dedicated editorial team with big ideas and a lofty ethos, and we were adamant to unearth any bit of corruption in the municipality, the government or the army.

We nurtured dubiousness towards young people with ironed shirts and media degrees. Between us, we used to think of the reporters we wanted as “alley cats” – curious, hungry, shameless, relentless and suspicious to the point of paranoia. The kind of people who would search the floor of a meeting room to find notes passed between politicians and nag neighbours and eye witnesses to get access to places where they are not wanted. But we also knew that journalism cannot work without those we secretly referred to as “accountants” or “geeks” – those who would meticulously read through thousands of pages of protocols or expenses sheets and put their finger on the discrepancy that would shake the system or find the quote that would cause mass institutional embarrassment.

We didn’t attribute much importance to the ability to “write nicely”. We wanted people who could retrieve the information. Everything else, we could edit and make presentable.  We didn’t believe in good news and indeed, there was none to be found. We dealt with a corrupt municipality (Mayor at the time and later Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert currently standing trial, among other things, for corruption allegations exposed by these reporters), suicide bombings, an army that has lost any respect for international law in its conduct in the West Bank and successive governmental scandals.

The last decade has brought vast changes in journalism. Schools of journalism have replaced the somewhat vague media degrees and many of them seem to be doing a good job at training young reporters, especially those that provide some scope for real work experience. This is important, as while the “personality traits” of the “reporter specimen” are still invaluable, journalism is not merely a personality disorder (as more than one journalist described it to me over the years).

It is a trade. There’s a lot to be learned. Indeed, as any reporter worth their salt would admit – most of it is learned on the ground, by making your own mistakes, being shouted at by a grumpy editor for not cross-checking your information, and working with more experienced colleagues. And still, the changes in journalism over the last years make training of all sorts more and more important.

I often go on in this blog about the transformation of reporters into all-in-one units. You need to be able to gather information, cross check it, document it on camera, edit film, create packages and podcasts and write perfect copy that could go on line within minutes of being delivered. Piling up great information and trusting an editor back in the office to turn it into something readable is no longer going to cut it.  Similarly, one cannot rely on being saved from mistakes by in-house legal teams. The speed of all media nowadays, and the fact that so many journalists are freelancers, enhances even further the centrality of both reliability and liability. Each journalist has the responsibility to be aware of the rules, and laws, of ethics and slander or consequences could be dire both legally and professionally.

GRNLive’s Henry Peirse observes with concern the fact that what used to be known as “institutional knowledge” seems to be going out of fashion. “Knowing a beat, a story a country – every angle – covering all your life – this used to be the way people progressed in journalism. A very specific knowledge, unfashionable now, but vital. So that, for example, when a new policy is being introduced the reporter who has been covering that beat for years, recognises it to be the same old stuff in different packaging”. In an era of “parachuted journalism” when so many reporters are here today and halfway across the world tomorrow, this kind of knowledge is becoming more and more rare, hence uniquely valuable.

For many of us there’s a decisive moment in which we know we’ve been initiated as reporters. For me it was one day in 1998, holding the phone receiver with a shaking hand after having attached quite clumsily a borrowed recording device to it. I listened with horror to a policeman admitting to me to having sexually molested his young nieces for years, a torment which led one of the two to commit suicide in the most terrible fashion, setting herself on fire at the bottom of the desert cliff of Masada. It was the end of a journalistic investigation in which I was helped by a veteran journalist who had all the traits of a bloodhound. Together we’d chased documents across the country, pleaded, eavesdropped, infiltrated into private gatherings, hassled family, relatives and social services and scavenged pieces of a diary together to create a jigsaw of evidence. The day this man was sentenced to 7 years in prison was the first time my work made me cry. I also knew I was in the right profession.

When did you know you were a reporter “for real”? Join our conversation and share your story and insights!

Continue reading »]]> By Daphna Baram

After a few strong and busy months of news, there’s always a slow one. The reasons for it are not always lack of news happening. Sometimes we are looking at the weeks ahead, making sure we have correspondents in all of our “forward planning” spots, securing feed points and sorting out insurance for those travelling, posting updates, videos and reports, and then… news interest seems to go elsewhere.

Trying to predict where news interest will go is essential to the business of news. It is also as secure a vocation as attempting to predict the weather for a summer wedding in the UK. The buntings can hang from the terraces, the flower arrangements may decorate the white tableclothed tables, but sudden torrential rain may well force the guests into the nearest pub.

Sometimes the reasons are very clear. A big and surprising news event – a sudden war, a natural disaster, a big scale terror attack in an unexpected location – can divert the world’s attention and take over the news agenda. On other occasions, if the event is planned ahead and “big” enough, all major broadcasters may decide to send their own correspondents in to cover it, in which case the freelancers might find themselves out of work for a while.

Sometimes a broadcaster’s foreign news agenda gets hijacked by an event involving ex-pats abroad getting into trouble, like Canadian contractors kidnapped in Nigeria, British tourists fall victim to crime in Antigua, or French aid workers held hostage in Chad. The rest of the world’s media may well keep going about its business, but the homeland of the players involved shifts its eyes to the scene.

In absence of earthquakes, real or metaphorical, it is sometimes the quirky story that attracts the heart and the commissioning instinct, especially as the days grow longer and the weather warmer. The last few summers, despite its “silly season” reputation, were packed with “real” news. But today, as the spring conquers over London with bright sunshine and flowers in bloom, we had more requests for “English people out in the parks in bathing suits” than demands for coverage of President Obama’s speech in Seoul.

We’ve also noticed that sometimes newsrooms tend to follow a story or an area more closely because they, or their audience, have “fallen in love” with a certain correspondent. An appealing and skilled reporter could keep a story on the news agenda for some broadcasters for quite a few days after the rest of the media has moved on to the next hot-spot.

But sometimes an event may walk the line between “potentially huge” and “we can take it or leave it”. This week opens with one of those – Pope Benedict’s visit to Cuba. The tensions between the communist regime and the Catholic Church could make for a fascinating historical event. Opposition groups in Cuba are protesting, millions of believers are celebrating, while Castro’s government braces itself warily for what could be a potential big PR boost, but at the same time harbours its own little perils.

GRN’s correspondent in Havana Luis Chirino is ready with hour to hour coverage of the Pontiff’s visit, but so far interest has been lukewarm. Cuba has lost its threatening mystique in the eyes of the Western media, and the awkward dance between the church and the government in socialist states seem to be a distant memory from the good, or bad, old days of the Cold War.

All this, of course, can change in a drop of a hat if the Holy Father, not particularly famous for his outstanding diplomatic skills, makes a controversial statement, official or unintended. A gay-rights gaff, a criticism of the state of human rights under the Castro brothers, or even a surprising call to the West to re-embrace Cuba, could give the visit a new spin and invoke media interest.

Because even when news editors seem to be taking a nap, they always keep one eye half open for that good old twist, which turns a “story of sorts” into top-of-the-hour news.

Continue reading »]]> International news are normally associated with the domain of the big global news organisations – BBC, CNN, Al-Jazeera – flashy brand “idents” and anchors in suits speaking directly to correspondents on the ground. When it comes to local media and regional television and radio broadcasters, the assumption is that they should stick to affairs nearer to home. International news is expensive to produce, and local broadcasters can not afford to produce them on their own.

But in the world we live in, the local and the global are no longer so far apart. People travel, and news travel with them, and back. The neighbour’s son could be involved in an international fraud which brings down a band halfway across the world, get kidnapped by pirates or get seriously injured in a bar brawl while honeymooning. On a happier note he could also get nominated president of the World Bank, or win the 100 meter run in the Olympics. People have friends, associates and relatives everywhere in the world. Sometimes, deliberately or inadvertently, they become top news.

Big world affairs can have a significant impact on local communities. A natural disaster in East Asia can devastate a small business in Kansas, or prompt an ex-pat community in northern England to an emergency charity fund raising effort, or recruit volunteers for rescue operations and blood donors for health relief. The bankruptcy of an investment company in Australia can change the economy of a town in Guatemala.

Local broadcasters often feel they have an interest and an obligation to cover certain aspects of international news, but they naturally do not have reporters on the ground where the news takes place. They can not always use standardised packages sold by the news agencies, because those rarely focus on what makes a certain piece of news relevant to their community of news consumers.

At GRN we often get approached by local radio and TV stations when such a story breaks. We do try to help by finding a correspondent on the ground and offer them special rates, but they still find it financially hard to use us for more frequent coverage. We would like that to change, without compromising the quality of our reporting, or the fees of our correspondents.

We believe that local broadcasters should be encouraged to bring the world into their communities in the way they choose to, and from the angles they deem appropriate, engaging, and relevant. This week we have applied for funding from the Knights Journalism Foundation by attempting to win their Networks Challenge. We offer to develop ways to help smaller networks think globally while acting, namely, broadcasting, locally.

I use the term “local” here a bit loosely. It could apply not only to a media that covers a defined geographical area, but also to a special interest media serving a defined community – ethnic minority, speakers of a certain language, members of a certain religion, or people with a specialised interest.

We are interested in forging closer relationships with local broadcasters not only because we have the resources and the ability to help them. We are well aware of how local journalists in an anonymous town can become invaluable for the big international news broadcasters, when unexpected international news story hits a relatively small spot, which is normally out of the way for the main international news vehicle.

This morning, sadly, we recruited a correspondent in Toulouse, to cover the massacre in the Jewish school there. Like in many localities which are not regularly covered by international media, there are always a few vacant hours before the news corps march in, which are a moment in which local journalists provide an invaluable service not only for the communities they operate in, but for millions of news consumers in other countries.

We are hoping to receive the asked funding so that we can subsidise our services to local media while encouraging our correspondents to research the interests of particular communities. We will endeavour to create a network of local media and learn about its particular needs in international reporting.

And as ever, we are keen to get your input. We are looking forward to your comments.

Continue reading »]]> Last week, on International Women’s Day, Reuters hosted an event at their headquarters in Canary Wharf, London, to celebrate the publication of No Women Land – On The Frontline With Female Reporters. The discussion was chaired by the BBC’s Lyse Doucet, on behalf of the International News Safety Institute (INSI) with Sarah Whitehead (Head of International News, Sky News), Nima Abu Bakher (CNN), Kate Brooks (photojournalist), Andy Roy (Head of News at BBC World News TV) and Maria Golvnina (Reuters). They were all bright and inspiring and their experience in the field invoked invaluable lessons and fascinating anecdotes.

Every few minutes, however, my thoughts wondered to Emily Hobhouse the Journalist who exposed the concentration camps the British forces created in South Africa during the Boer War and the horrific conditions in them for the Manchester Guardian. She would have probably been puzzled. Over a 100 years on, female journalists are still compelled to wonder whether they are an abnormality, or a bit of a novelty. Martha Gellhorn too would have probably raised an ironic eyebrow. The American who covered almost every war from the Spanish civil war of 1936 to the American invasion of Panama in 1979. When the Balkan wars erupted in the 1990s Gellhorn conceded her defeat by age. “You need to be nimble” she explained.

Female journalists at the frontline seem to have been out there almost as long as journalism itself, but the vision of “a chick in a helmet”, as one of the panelist ironically referred to herself, bringing the news from some smoking and troubled part of the world, has certainly become more ubiquitous in the last two decades. In her contribution to the book Galina Sidorova puts her finger on the most feasible reasons for it, which no doubt exceed the boundaries of her homeland, Russia: “it is low paid, and it is dangerous”

After reading the book over the weekend I wondered how many female journalists are on GRNs books, and realised there is no way to find out without counting them manually, as we do not, of course, mark them in any way. I gave up on the counting after two minutes, concluding that about a third of our correspondents are women, and the number seems to be on the rise.

But more interesting than the number, was the quality and prominence of the women who covered the gory and exciting events of the last few years for GRN. Rania Abouzeid and Delphine Minoui followed every Israeli invasion, Syrian intervention and internal scuffle in Lebanon; Ruth Sherlock, Jihan Hafiz and Portia Walker covered Libya, Rachel Shabi was in Tunisia and in Egypt, where she joined Noel King and Marwa Rakha; Alice Fordham and Tina Susman were in Iraq, Orly Halpern in Jerusalem, Jetta Xharra in Kosovo, Iona Craig in Sana’a, and this really is but a sample. Do we hesitate to send a female journalist out to be interviewed in a hazardous zone? No more than we hesitate to send a man. The thought has never crossed my mind nor – judging by the bookings that have piled up in the credit of our female journalists this year – has it crossed the mind of any other GRN editor. Does this have to do with the fact that the vast majority of the commissioning in GRN is done by female duty editors, Mais Al-Baya’a and myself, both worked as journalists in the frontlines of our own homelands, Iraq and Israel?

I doubt it. We do not seem to be unique in that sense. Most women, at least those who work for media in the West, said sending them “out there” never seemed to be an issue with their editors, male or female. However journalists from Africa, the Middle East and Asia still often say they had to fight for the right to go out into the field and felt they were expected to prove themselves every step of the way more than their male colleagues.

But the sexual assault on CBS reporter Lara Logan at Tahrir square did make the elephant in the room very visible all of a sudden. Editors and news consumers are happy to have women reporting wars, but the danger of us being attacked sexually or raped seems to be the main “additional risk” on everybody’s minds. Women on the frontline are compelled to combine addressing this hazard openly on one hand, while insisting that it should not compromise their ability to do their job properly on the other. “Like that black grime you see between the tiles in a damp, neglected bathroom, an attack like this lives with you. The consequences are not to be underestimated or dismissed”, writes Logan in the book, “But it also can be washed away. And the ideal of freedom that drives us as journalists, the freedom of speech that we embody, is what is really at stake”.

Logan says she felt empowered by the way her employer, CBS, dealt with her case, setting the standard: “you have a duty to stand by your employee, an unconditional, honest, unwavering duty”. Other female journalists express similar ideas. If women can feel they can raise such concerns with their editors and discuss the risk without fearing this might infringe on their chances of being sent out to cover war zones, the right balance will be achieved.

Others mention that men can be, and are being, sexually attacked as well. And while there’s a lot of talk in the book about Middle Eastern cultures and the dangers they may carry for women who see independent and liberated (which might read as fair game), many others complain of fellow western journalists, army officials and others, who often pose a similar, if not worse, threat. Sexual assault is not, primarily, a sex crime, it is first an foremost an act of violence aimed to humiliate its victim, as the whole world has been reminded by the photographs of torture from Abu-Ghraib prison a few years ago.

LA  Times correspondent Tina Susman expresses clearly in the book what many female journalists echo.  “Did they rape you” was the first question she was asked by her rescuers who pulled her out of the room where she’s been held captive in Somalia, and they seemed surprised when she said no. Rape, she says, “never featured high on my list of concerns”, before or after that experience. “I worried, and worry – about my plane or helicopter being shot down; being trampled in a stampede; being hit by a stray bullet; getting kidnapped again; or stepping on a landmine. I even worry about giant insect crawling into my sleeping bag”.

There are many advantages to being a female journalist in a war or disaster infested zone in a conservative society. Women are often rendered “invisible” and unthreatening, and may get access to places that men are banned from. They can often speak unsupervised to other women, pass through checkpoints without too much inspection and get briefed by officials who drop their guard.

This may be what prompted the BBC’s John Simpson to dress as a woman when infiltrating Afghanistan’s Nangarhar Province with his similarly disguised team. So proud was he of this achievement, that he might have misjudged the danger which making the story known may have posed to his fellow female journalists.

The “tips from women in the field” at the end of the book are useful and alarming. Besides advice on how to dress in Muslim countries and how to choose the right clothes to run in if attacked, there’s a rather long section dedicated to hygiene, thrush avoidance, tampons and the chilling “consider bringing a morning after pill in case of rape if going to high-risk areas”.

Questions of motherhood and family also feature often in the discourse around female journalists at the frontline. Many women feel angered by the notion that editors would bring their family situation into consideration into account when deciding whether to send them on a dangerous mission. Andy Roy said in the discussion at Reuters that his only consideration is who is the best journalist to do the job and whether the journalist in question, a man or a woman is happy to take on a mission, whether they have children or not.

A male colleague provided an intriguing answer to this question. “It is of course a personal choice and I wouldn’t interfere in somebody else’s choices. For me, once I had a family I knew that my days of dodging bullets in hazardous environment were over. I personally think that anybody who goes out to cover wars with children back at home is simply mad”.

I’d recommend No Woman’s Land to anybody interested in journalism in our time. The accounts are interesting, thought provoking and there’s much to be learned from them. My only qualm was about the (very few) articles written by journalists anonymously, without any details about them and the kind of work they do. Nothing in what appears in those sections seemed to justify the anonymity of their writers, though the wild generalizations about Middle Eastern men in one of them may explain why the commentator wished to remain unknown. It is a strange choice for a journalist to write anonymously about her trade and editorially I believe this path should be taken only in extreme cases.

What do you think? Please join our discussion.