News
Home Front
Today, I came across a blog written by the wife of a member of the Royal Marines. She’s been blogging since 2006. Her husband has already completed one tour of Afghanistan since she started writing and he is due to start another six-month deployment in September. Her blog provides an insight into the ups and […]
Molly-coddled journalists
Paul Callan of the Daily Express rails against research claiming journalists may have a hard time coping with addiction, depression, or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as a result of reporting from conflict zones and the like. The Press Gazette publishes a letter from Callan who says a trip down the pub is all he’s ever […]
Bilal Hussein wins journalism prize
Associated Press photographer Bilal Hussein, who spent more than two years in U.S. military custody in Iraq on suspicion of being a security threat, was awarded a journalism prize by the Miguel Gil Moreno Foundation on Thursday. link
Chronology of journalists killed in Iraq
As an Iraqi cameraman was shot dead by U.S. troops as he walked home on Thursday. Reuters has put together a recent chronology of journalists killed in Iraq. Reporters Without Borders has called the Iraq war the deadliest conflict for journalists since World War Two, with 213 journalists and support workers killed since 2003. link
Rough Justice
A tale of two men in modern, democratic Afghanistan, seven years after ‘liberation’. Both charged with serious crimes, both cases receiving a significant amount of publicity. General Abdul Rashid Dostum, former Northern Alliance commander and warlord with a private army, has been charged over the abduction and abuse of a father and son who ended […]
Illegal border crossing – for tourists
Panting for breath, I waded through cow-pat flavoured mud, struggling to keep myself from slipping in the dark. “Vamanos, vamanos, vamanos!†urged my coyote, the Spanish name for people who smuggle migrants across the border into the United States. The sound of La Migra’s sirens – also known as United States Border Patrol – sounded […]
New Militia for Darfur
[video:youtube:EwgQIeRjCk0] If you thought international efforts to find peace in Darfur were going nowhere, think again. It seems that while I wasn’t looking, the “global citizenry” has been organising itself into a force to take on the Janjaweed and Sudanese government. Admittedly at the moment it comprises only Peacepipe Repairman and Kitten but as I […]
Crossroads
“Abu Skandar, who always drives by the university when he comes to Cairo from Heliopolis, has made this passegiata into his personal polling sample to measure the progress or regression of Islamic veiling. I secretly suspect him of privileging the qualitative aspect of the investigation over its strictly quantitative dimensions. In his defense, it is […]
Anthony Loyd and Seamus Murphy in Mexico
Frontline Club regulars reporter Anthony Loyd and photographer Seamus Murphy put together an audio slideshow from Palomas, Mexico. Click the image above to watch and listen the report, or you can read the same story here, Palomas is no stranger to violent death. Straddling a main contraband route across the Mexican-US border, the settlement has […]
Shopping in Sudan
Darfur is not exactly a shoppers’ paradise. The sand and heat make it a bit much to spend the whole day browsing the stalls, although parking is not really a problem. But it’s amazing what you can find. In El Fasher I’ve seen jars of sour cherries, bottles of Spanish olive oil and fridges packed […]
Beautiful Mogadishu
There was one must-have item on my last (quite possibly last as in my final trip ever) trip to Mogadishu, the “Beautiful Mogadishu” T-shirt. They came in two designs, one featuring a smiling camel and a second featuring the simple star of Somalia. And they came in two sizes, small and not-quite-big enough. I bought […]
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.
Fasih Ahmed wins New York Press Club Award
Fasih Ahmed has won the New York Press Club’s Best Spot News Award 2007 for coverage of the Benazir Bhutto assassination for Newsweek. â€I am very pleased to have been acknowledged by my peers in journalism,†said Mr Ahmed. This is an award for democracy and for Pakistan. Mr Ahmed was the Inaugural Daniel Pearl […]
Drago Hedl wins award for war crimes journalism
[video:youtube:7f6AyehCFJQ] Croatian journalist Drago Hedl has won the Outstanding Merits in Investigative Journalism Award for 2008 announced by the Central European Initiative (CEI) and the South East Europe Media Organization (SEEMO) yesterday. Hedl works as an editor and journalist with the political weekly Feral Tribune in Split, The jury said it based its decision “on […]
James Whitlow Delano in Burma
Digital Journalist publishes pictures and words from contributing photographer James Whitlow Delano. He was in Burma working on another assignment when Cyclone Nargis hit. For ten days he was able to travel the Irrawaddy River Delta and photograph what he found, Few western journalists managed to get in to the country, and those who did […]
Brain Drain Dooms Somalia?
With peace talks in Djibouti underpinned by growing momentum for another round of U.N. peacekeeping, is Somalia on the verge of a turn-around following 17 years of conflict? Mark Bowden asked this question in a piece for The Philadelphia Enquirer. His answer is pessimistic: One of the things Somalia lacks is a capable, homegrown movement […]
Twitter’s quicker
“Just heard a big blast near badi chowpak. Donno what it was.”Not much of a quote, but it was enough to get the story out. Sandil Srinivasan, or 2s as he is known on the microblogging service Twitter, was in Jaipur on 13 May when the first of a series of nine synchronized bombs exploded […]
The gorilla wades in
YouTube is launching Citizen News (from RWW) The CitizenNews channel is where we’ll be highlighting some of the best news content on YouTube. If you see examples of great journalism and reporting being done by your fellow YouTubers, let me know! So that’s that, then. Well, maybe. Until now, anybody with a newsworthy video could […]
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 […]
Interview with Peter Jouvenal
Kabul based Peter Jouvenal, one of the original Frontline agency journalists and an Afghan specialist is interviewed by TalkRadioNews military affairs correspondent Richard Miller. You can read about and listen to the 20 minute interview here or play it directly here. Peter touches on how he came to live in Afghanistan, his early days as […]
U.N. Blue Berets Bump Ethiopians in Somalia?
Last week the U.N. Security Council approved a peacekeeping operation for Somalia. It’s the first step to actually deploying troops to the region. There are huge hurdles, of course. The last time the U.N. tried to intervene in the mostly ungoverned country, 18 U.S. soldiers and hundreds of Somalis died in the Battle of Mogadishu. […]
I was your editor once
[video:youtube:3U06nqagtyc] Lessons in how not to be a reporter: Lesson 1 – I was your editor once.
The need for a niche
There’s something genuinely touching about Michael Rosemblum’s testimony to Ken Krushel. Together they devised CitizeNews, and launched it last summer: Then we went out to try and raise money for it. It was not easy. We were late. After Youtube and just as newspapers were starting to migrate into video. We talked to everyone in […]
Video: Shakira aims to help poor kids
[video:bliptv:919899] Last Thursday, Colombian popstar Shakira got a group of Latin American stars and businessmen together in the Mexican capital to launch ALAS (meaning “WINGS”), a Latin American initiative aimed at aiding the development of young children in the region. Shakira, who recently got together with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Robert Zoellick, president […]
Sean Smith “nothing very original”
Photographer Sean Smith is profiled in the Press Gazette today. Sean used video and stills photography in Iraq to report for the Guardian newspaper and he talked about his pictures at the Frontline Club in February soon after winning his Press Photographer of the year award. He talks about his no-nonsense apporach and the importance […]
Tony Jones on becoming a foreign correspondent
ABC Australia journalist Tony Jones talks to the Sydney Morning Herald about his first steps to becoming a foreign correspondent. When Tony Jones was at Sydney University, a visitor to his boarding college changed his life. Flamboyant foreign correspondent Francis James came to talk about his experiences in South-East Asia and his views on the […]
Andrew Keen admits failure
Andrew Keen came to London with a motion some called ludicrous – Is new media killing journalism? – debate ensued at the Frontline Club and in today’s Independent he admits, he lost. It was my job to argue that the internet is killing journalists. To cut a long debate short, I lost. It was my […]
Iraqi blogger killed in Baghdad
Ahmed, the author of BlogIraq, has been killed in Baghdad. A post written on his blog by a friend, Mohammed Alani, describes how Ahmed was due to meet another man in Mansour District on 11 April. The man was supposed to be giving Ahmed some documents about his investigations into a USAID office in Baghdad. […]
31 very interesting things. 4: Cardiff’s Somali Community
The Guardian put together a great interactive map of Britain a couple of years ago showing the location of different ethnic minorities. I’d love to know why Greeks were attracted to Guildford. The Irish in Cheltenham is pretty obvious. And then there’s the Somalis in Cardiff. They first arrived there to work on the docks […]
