CPJ promotes press freedom worldwide and defends the right of journalists to report the news without fear of reprisal.
IWMF fellows during a training scenario. ALL #IWMFfellows receive Hostile Environments & Security Training prior to IWMF-sponsored reporting trips. Photo: IWMF/Hannah Stonebraker
The outfit Global Journalist Security offers a course in covering hostile environments—like a war zone, or the upcoming political conventions.
CPJ research shows that 24 journalists and one media worker have been killed in Afghanistan since the increase in U.S.-led hostilities against the Taliban and other militant groups following the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York. Those numbers do not include Gilkey or Tamanna. Of those 24 journalists, four were photographers. In CPJ’s database of journalists killed in the line of duty worldwide since 1992, nearly 90 percent of victims were local. In Afghanistan, however, three-quarters of the victims have been international journalists.
It’s obvious what’s gained from these collaborations. As travel budgets decline, the work of far-flung freelancers is increasingly in demand, but often without any initial financial outlay from the outlets that eventually run our content. That leaves a freelancer with the near-impossible task of figuring out how to cover the cost of transportation, fixers, translators, equipment, and accommodation, while still being able to eat.
That calculation changes when a UN agency or an NGO springs for the cost of a flight or offers a place to stay.
Beyond the bottom line, there is the issue of safety.
Continue reading at Columbia Journalism Review, by Andrew Green
UN Photo
Above: The site where the body of journalist Evany José Metzker was discovered on May 18, 2015, five days after he disappeared in Brazil’s Jequitinhonha valley. Photo: Valseque Bomfim
He called himself the Owl of the Valley. Journalist Evany José Metzker, 67, wanted to see everything that happened in this backwater town situated amid the banana plantations and clandestine gold mines of Brazil’s interior.
Straddling a major highway where truck robberies and child prostitution are routine, Padre Paraíso has 18,000 inhabitants, many of whom are destitute. In recent years drug gangs have taken hold of the town. “Here, they’d kill you for two cents,” muttered one policeman.
On May 13 Metzker, who was on a reporting trip from his home 73 miles away, disappeared. Five days later, his beheaded corpse was found by the side of a secluded dirt track.
How does Susan Orlean find her profile subjects? How does Malcolm Gladwell get his sources to speak with him? How does Sarah Stillman bring the characters in her stories to life? Thanks to the Longform podcast, we listened in on conversations with writers for The New Yorker as they spilled their secrets for outstanding reporting and storytelling.
“I was still angry enough, too, in the wake of the betrayal and my abduction 15 months earlier, to want to spit on the memory of being beaten and shot, to be able to stand by the leering abyss and whisper, ‘I’m still here, alive, reporting. So f*** you.’ There was, of course, one other reason I went back. It is the hardest to explain, but perhaps the most valid of all: I went back because war sucks. It sucks you back in.”
Why political journalists shouldn’t report on internal polling
“Journalists have incentives to make mountains out of mole hills, to the detriment of the public and the political process,” Hayes said. “You need something to throw up on the website. You need hits. Your instinct is to write it up because at least there’s something that’s happening. But that implies to voters and readers the thing that you’re reporting on is truly substantively important in some way. Most of the time, it’s just not.”
What has it been like to cover Ferguson from St. Louis? “Ferguson is just one of many…”