News
Elephant’s graveyard
Words of woe for club members John Simpson and George Alagiah seeping from the pen of Daily Mail columnist Richard Kay today, Perhaps globetrotting John Simpson should avoid the Pan Bookshop on the Fulham Road when next in London. His book News From No Man’s Land is at half price in the shop’s closing down […]
From Persia to politics
Former NBC war reporter Arthur Kent who earned the nickname “Scud Stud” during the 1992 Gulf War is moving into politics. He’ll be running as a Conservative candidate in Calgary, “After 36 years as a reporter, much of it spent as a foreign correspondent witnessing the downside of gridlock and geopolitical conflict and war, I’ve […]
The story of news
[video:youtube:3VIdKIBN2Ms] The Washington Times goes inside the Newseum with Newseum Executive Director & Senior Vice President Joe Urschel. He claims the Newseum is the “most interactive museum in the world” The video includes film of an armour plated truck used by TIME Magazine photographers during the war in Bosnia that was hit by a mortar […]
Wilson heads to Harvard
Frontline club founder member Simon Wilson is taking a one year break from the BBC and his former desk at the Middle East bureau to head to Harvard. He blogs on the BBC Editors blog about his new life and how the decline of the American newspaper industry looks on the ground, One thing that’s […]
Lara Logan says “Screw you”
[video:youtube:XK5WIjWXTbU] In an interview published in the Huffington Post today, CBS Chief Foreign Correspondent Lara Logan says her greatest achievement is “being able to say screw you to all the people who said that a woman like me couldn’t make it in this business” The piece originally ran in Good magazine late last year. In […]
Journalist killed in Niger
Within one minute of writing the previous post about journalist fatalities in 2007, we learn that Niger journalist and radio station director Abdou Mahaman has been killed by a landmine in the capital Niamey, He is the third civilian to die in explosions in the south since December, when the government accused Tuareg-led rebels of […]
That was the year that was
IFEX (International Freedom of eXpression Exchange) reviews 2007 at the sharp end of journalism with differing figures from the Committee to Protect Journalists (65 journalists killed), Reporters without Borders (at least 86 journalists killed), the Canadian Journalists for Free Expression (102 journalists killed) and the International Federation of Journalists (171 journalists and media workers were […]
Ross Kemp in Helmand
Ex-soap star Ross Kemp heads to Helmand in a new five-part series. The Guardian has a trailer for the series and background on Organ Grinder, “During one engagement between B Company and the Taliban, we were pinned down by enemy fire in open ground,” he says. “Bullets fizzed inches from our heads, hitting the ground […]
For journalism
BBC World Service, Deutsche Welle, Radio France Internationale, Radio Netherlands Worldwide and the Voice Of America issue “an unprecedented joint resolution denouncing what they termed growing trends towards media restrictions and attacks on journalists in many of the countries to which they broadcast.” The heads of five of the largest international broadcasters have called upon […]
Is our media dying?
[video:youtube:e09PxmPJ-Tg] Not all the indicators agree with the sentiment shown in the Simpsons video, but many of the American ones do.
Marie Colvin in Basra
Last week Frontline Club member and Sunday Times journalist, Marie Colvin, became the first unembedded western journalist from a British newspaper to visit Basra for nearly two years. She worked under the cover of an abbaya. Nevertheless, Basra is an extremely dangerous place to work unembedded. So much so that one of Marie’s interviewees took […]
Somali journalist arrested
Freelance journalist Idle Moallim based in the port city of Bossaso in Somalia has been arrested by police in the northern Puntland region while working on a human trafficking story. The arrest comes less than a month after French journalist Gwen Le Gouil was kidnapped while working on another human trafficking story. Le Gouil was […]
Bikinis to Islamabad
Chief foreign correspondent for CBS Lara Logan secured an exclusive with Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf for the 60 Minutes show, but not all her luggage made it with her from near her hometown in South Africa, The interview capped a frantic week-and-a-half for Ms. Logan, who was vacationing on a beach near her South African […]
Ghaith Abdul-Ahad profiled
[video:youtube:JoOmquaRCx8] Menassat, an organisation that promotes good journalism in the Middle East and North Africa, begins a new series profiling arab journalists. Lebanon-based Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, who writes and photographs for The Guardian and has twice been shortlisted for best foreign correspondent of the year by the British Press Awards, is first up, “I think rule […]
The blogs of war
[video:dailymotion:x29jxt] Broadcast Journalist David Heathfield has a great 8 minute long report on the impact of the internet on how war is reported and who is reporting it in the 21st century. This video offers a good deal of background leading on from our previous post on Reporting restrictions. via cyberjournalist
The toll of foreign reporting
On today’s Desert Island Discs programme, the BBC’s Today Programme interviewee frightener John Humphrys admits working as a foreign correspondent takes its toll on family life. Humprhys adds he gave up being a foreign correspondent in 1981 because he was tired as life on the road, “I remember going on one trip when my daughter […]
Reporting restrictions
Tom Roeder of the Colorado Springs Gazette kicks off his Iraq Notebook blog by uploading a copy of the original reporting restrictions agreement he signed with the US Military before heading to Iraq, It’s fairly rare for reporters, always fond of their constitutional rights, to agree to any government-imposed restriction of their activities. It’s important […]
A Painter of Battles
Novelist Arturo Pérez-Reverte draws on his experience as a war reporter in Lebanon, Bosnia, Libya and elsewhere for his latest book, A Painter of Battles. Lorraine Adams reviews it for the New York Times, The hero of “The Painter of Battles,†Andrés Faulques, lives in a 300-year-old tower on the Spanish coast. A war photographer […]
From the Frontline club
More words worth listening to… Roy Greenslade’s latest episode in the BBC World Service series Press for Freedom begins with Roy at the Frontline club. Who’s that laughing at the beginning?
Future of foreign reporting
The World podcast discusses the future of the foreign correspondent with HotZone war reporter Kevin Sites, ex-Baltimore Sun reporter John Schidlovsky, David Sasaki of Global Voices, McClatchy’s Roy Gutman and Ed Fooey, a media analyst. There is some talk of the ‘one man bureaus’ we discussed earlier at fromthefrontline. You can listen direct here – […]
From Harry Potter to Mogadishu
Daniel Radcliffe, star of the Harry Potter films, is set to portray Reuters war photographer Dan Eldon who was stoned and beaten to death along with Hansi Krauss, Anthony Macharia also from Reuters and Hos Maina from the Associated Press in Mogadishu in July 1993. The film is called Journey and will be directed by […]
Bruce Loudon on being a foreign correspondent
Bruce Loudon has worked as a foreign correspndent since 1968. He is currently The Australian’s South Asia correspondent. In today’s Australian he ponders the life he leads and the near misses he’s missed, Nothing concentrates the mind quite like sitting atop 10 tonnes of lethal ammunition stacked into the belly of an ancient, clapped out, […]
From Colorado Springs to Baghdad
Colorado Springs Gazette reporter Tom Roeder and photojournalist David Bitton head to Baghdad to report on the 4,000 soliders from the Springs area who are stationed there. The duo will report for the newspaper and will also keep a blog – Iraq Notebook. On reporting from Iraq, the Gazette notes, The Army doesn’t censor reports […]
Miguel Gil Moreno prize announced
The 7th Miguel Gil Moreno journalism prize has just been announced. Journalists of any nationality and working in any medium can apply. However, entries must be translated into Spanish. The deadline in March. Moreno was a freelance correspondent and war reporter. He was killed in Sierra Leone, along with Reuters correspondent Kurt Schork in May […]
Fesperman on foreign correspondents
Former Baltimore Sun foreign correspondent and political thriller writer Dan Fesperman talks about his work and how he’s glad he’s not a newbie starting out in journalism today, It’s depressing. I look around, and you look at the number of foreign bureaus, and they’re fewer every day. The Sun used to have eight. Well, they […]
Kate Webb remembered
Journalist and author Steve Le Vine remembers Kate Webb who died in May 2007, It almost didn’t matter how many consecutive nights you sat down with Kate for a beer. She had another hair-raising memory to recount, the type of story that — if it alone had happened to anyone else, why he or she […]
Christina Lamb remembers Bhutto
Award winning journalist and club member Christina Lamb remembers Benazir Bhutto in today’s Sunday Times, We had just entered Santa’s castle in the pretty Portuguese village of Obidos on Thursday when my phone beeped with the first text message. “Benazir has been critically wounded in bomb attack – in hospital undergoing treatment.†I think I […]
Taking the flak
A new BBC comedy about the life of war reporters is set to start filming in January. Martin Jarvis will portray a veteran foreign correspondent and war reporter in the six part BBC2 series, called Taking the flak, set in a fictional African country. The series is written by Frontline club member and former Frontline […]
147 year old war photography
Some 200 historic black-and-white images from the American civil war are published in the new book, “Historic Photos of Chickamauga Chattanooga” by James A. Hoobler. The book follows “Historic Photos of Gettysburg” and is part of a planned series. “It’s the most traumatic event in American history — the only time we went to war […]
Afshin Rattsani remembers Bhutto
Frontline club member and Al Jazeera journalist Afshin Rattansi recalls meeting Benazir Bhutto on the steps of the club opposite Mickey’s fish and chip bar after her Q&A session in July 2007, It was quite a scene. Members of her security detail – I assume – milled about in front of Mickey’s Fish and Chip […]
