News
Stalin’s Children: Three Generations of Love and War
I have read many sagas of Russian families, but this one has facets that make it poignant. It is both tragedy and love story by a distinguished chronicler of the East. Matthews has covered Moscow for Newsweek since 1997 and has witnessed the Chechen, Bosnian and second Iraqi wars. He knows something about the drama […]
Busted in Beijing
Kevin German gets his collar felt while shooting the arrest of a "scalper" in Beijing. Scalpers sell tickets for inflated prices to punters wanting a seat at the Olympics, Once the man was on the ground the other officer lunged at me again. He pushed me and hit me in the head. I don’t think […]
Telegraph closes Berlin bureau
The Telegraph will close its Berlin bureau leaving the paper with just one foreign news desk in Europe reports The Guardian. A stringer is expected to replace Berlin correspondent Harry de Quettville who will return to London to work int he features department. The move leaves just Henry Samuel in Paris as the paper’s only […]
Crossing the frontline
[video:youtube:wmGl5FACJ2o] This dramatic footage purports to show journalists crossing the frontline in Georgia because… well, it doesn’t look as if there is anywhere else to go.
Ethiopians Withdrawing from Somalia?
Thousands of Ethiopian troops reportedly are retreating from Mogadishu after nearly two years of bloody fighting.The withdrawal, which still leaves sizable Ethiopian and A.U. (pictured) forces in the city, coincides with two separate peace talks: one, U.N.-brokered, aiming at reconciling all of Somalia’s armed parties; the other, encouraged by Ethiopia, meant to prevent a split […]
Rude Awakening
I’ve been woken up each morning at around 5am for the last two days by a constant stream of helicopters and jets passing over my house here in Kandahar City. A big battle is being fought in Dand district, just over 10 kilometres away from the city. The Taliban are able to operate within the […]
No longer safe
Daniel Lak from CBC News talks about the changing status of journalists in conflict zones. No longer just bystanders, as Michael Holmes refelected in the previous post, but targets, “In the ’60s and ’70s, reporters were somehow regarded by all sides as tellers of the story, people who got out their version, and were allowed […]
Michael Holmes on shooting journalists
CNN correspondent Michael Holmes reflects on a week in which an alarming number of journalists have been either killed, injured and/or targetted in Georgia. Michael wasn’t stuck in a car in Georgia like the Turkish reporters he empathises with, but he’s experienced a imilar situation in Iraq, On January 27, 2004, our two-car convoy was […]
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
Reporters under fire
[video:youtube:So07TMHRJ7E] CNN reports on the recent spate of journalist shootings and deaths in South Ossetia and Georgia.
In the 21st century…
Two great clips via Mohamed Nanabhay, Head of New Media at the AlJazeera Network. All about Georgia, Iraq, politics, the west and ‘stuff’… say no more. Just go over and take a peek.
FOX news reporters shot at in Gori
[video:youtube:UQXUW_ks8ls] FOX News reporter Steve Harrigan says he and a group of journalists were shot at in the Georgian town of Gori by “irregular, undisciplined, angry” Georgian forces with pistols. However, this appears to have happened at the same location we previously posted and both EuroNews and The Guardian reported the incident saying the man […]
Impossible to verify 2,000 dead
From the BBC Editors blog Jon Williams, BBC World News Editor, offers an interesting perspective on how easy it is for big media to get access to powerful people who want a soapbox, but how difficult it is to verify basic facts, For the BBC to have access to someone so influential [as Georgian President […]
The PR tour of South Ossetia
[video:youtube:FGAUhEFvbfo] There’s something quite bizarre about watching a truck load of journalists being ferried around a warzone by the people who are in large part responsible for the destruction. What can we possibly learn from such tightly controlled tours? Just how do the journalists ferret through debris to find a meaningful story? Many of the […]
Blood Trail to Toronto Film Festival 2008
Blood Trail is the result of fifteen years of filming one man in war zones across the world. It’s been a labour of love for Frontline Club founder Vaughan Smith and original Frontline TV agency cameraman Richard Parry since they first met wannabe photographer Robert King in Bosnia in the early 90s. The film will […]
Arkady Babchenko in Georgia
Arkady Babchenko’s photographs of the war in Georgia and South Ossetia are more graphic than you’ll find in the British press. Arkady is an ex-Russian soldier turned author who served in Chechnya. He works as a journalist with Novaya Gazeta – the same newspaper that Anna Politkovskaya wrote for before she was murdered. We’ve featured […]
Cluster bombs killed Stan Storimans
Bombies, originally uploaded by myriadity. Human Rights Watch say the attack on Gori that killed at least eight civilians, including Dutch journalist Stan Storimans, and injured dozens involved the use of cluster bombs, “Cluster bombs are indiscriminate killers that most nations have agreed to outlaw,†said Marc Garlasco, senior military analyst at Human Rights Watch. […]
Czech politician puts war reporting boots back on
JaromÃr Å tětina is a Czech senator with the Green Party. At the outbreak of war in Georgia he made his excuses and headed to the border. This is a politician with a difference. An ex-war reporter who has covered conflict in Europe, Asia and Africa and the Caucasus. “I came here to seek the truth […]
Sean Smith in Georgia
Frontline Club regular and World Press photographer of the year Sean Smith is in Georgia for The Guardian. Here are the latest snaps.
Another Georgian journalist shot
Euronews captures what it is says is a Russian military official shooting a female Georgian journalist in the arm in or near the Georgian town of Gori. This appears to be a seperate incident from the one mentioned in the previous post where another female Georgian journalist was shot in the arm while broadcasting live […]
Footage of Georgian TV journalist fired upon during report
[video:youtube:-ETQpCsvrIY] A Georgian TV journalist is apparently fired upon by a Russian sniper and injured while delivering a piece to camera. Fortunately, she’s soon patched up and back on with the job. UPDATE: I see Reuters have now picked up on the video: A correspondent working for Georgian state television was injured in a shooting […]
Israeli soldiers off the hook over Fadel Shana killing
David Schlesinger talks about his disappointment in the report this week from Israel’s senior military lawyer stating that Israeli forces will not face legal action following the killing of Reuters man Fadel Shana, I’ve written before that a camera is not a weapon, that a journalist is not a combatant, that the pen and the […]
Footage of Dutch cameraman killed in Gori
[video:youtube:B-epO3SDVYg] Disturbing footage of what appears to be the aftermath of an attack on the centre of the Georgian town of Gori. It’s difficult to ascertain the veracity of the footage, although this appears to be the attack that killed the Dutch cameraman Stan Storimans during the Russian bombardment of the town. An edit of […]
Footage of Turkish journalists under attack in Gori
[video:youtube:mp6hB5RvYoM] Footage has surfaced of NTV journalists coming under fire in Gori, the Georgian town 30km from South Ossetia. It aired on the Turkish NTV channel. I think it is from the attack first reported on Sunday, Russian NTV producer Peter Gassiyev was injured in an attack by unidentified forces outside Tskhinvali, the news Web […]
Tributes to Alexander Klimchuk
Tributes to Alexander Klimchuk, the photographer who owned Caucasus Press Images and was killed in the South Ossetian capital Tskhinvali earlier this week, are pouring in to the Lightstalkers forum. Mark Pinder, a freelance photographer from North Shields, Tyne and Wear talked to Amateur Photographer about his memories of the Georgian snapper, “We first met […]
Temuri Kiguradze whereabouts unknown
22 year old war reporter Winston Featherly-Bean, who was shot in North Ossetia on Sunday, has been transfered to an intensive care unit in a Moscow hospital according to Anchorage Daily News, “We’ve learned that Winston was suddenly operated on again today,” [Winston’s brother, Peter Featherly-Bean] wrote in an e-mail to family and friends early […]
The Fixer gets Tribeca funding
The Fixer, a film by Ian Olds, is one of seven documentary film projects to recieve funding from the Tribeca Film Institute‘s inaugural Gucci Tribeca Documentary Finishing Fund. Each project will receive $80,000 to help towards post production costs. The Fixer focuses on the relationship between Afghan translator, Ajmal Naqshbandi, and the war reporter Christian […]
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 […]
Getting the story out of South Ossetia
The Press Gazette does a good job of telling us how the British press got the story out of South Ossetia at the same time most of them were heavily focussed on what was going on in Beijing. Listed in among the ranks of foreign correspondents who were first on the scene are Frontline Club […]
