Three time winner of the Royal Television Society Journalist of the year award, Sky special correspondent Alex Crawford spoke on trauma, risk, the tools of her trade and why she would rather eat her own liver than be a presenter.
The reports for which most recently she is best known are from Libya; her pieces from Zawiya under attack from Gaddafi’s forces and the final push towards Tripoli.
Disarmingly modest throughout – almost reticent to talk about her achievements, Crawford told Vin Ray, former director of the BBC College of Journalism, about being trapped in Zawiya as Gaddafi’s troops closed in.
“Zawiya in March was an incredibly traumatic time for all of us. I’ve never been through anything like it and I hope I never go through anything like it again. It was very, very traumatic”
The people of Zawiya were desperate for the pictures to get out and prove that, contrary to government propaganda, the city was being crushed by Gaddafi’s forces.
“We felt we had a moral duty to get the pictures out. And whether you agree with it or not… it gave a lot of meat to David Cameron and Nicholas Sarkozy’s argument that there needed to be a no-fly zone.”
Dealing with the stress of being a foreign correspondent isn’t easy – her children keep her grounded after spending time away.
“I’d say ‘you have to eat that… there are people in Baghdad who would love to have that. And I remember my little daughter saying… ‘well take it to the people in Baghdad, I don’t want it!…”
But what then of the risks that go hand in hand with her job?
“…You have to be able to feel that all those risks and dangers were actually worth it. I want to go back and face my children and them to feel that I’ve done something worthwhile. And that’s what makes it worth it.”
Mindful of the hoard of journalism students in the room – and I’m one of them – Crawford gave a number of hints for effective TV journalism.
Her only rule when it comes to scripting or ‘writing to picture’ is “it has to be simple”. The information, she says, must be ‘boiled down’ because of the short length of TV pieces.
Impartiality is a fallacy Crawford says –
“We should stop apologising for feeling… If you can’t feel it then how can you report with passion?”
Rather than learning lines by heart, Crawford makes sure she’s aware of the anything the presenter might ask her. But –
“Quite often, before I became a foreign correspondent I’d be stuck outside the High Court and (Sky presenter) Kay Burley would ask me a question and I’d think ‘Oh my God I don’t know the answer to that, so [I’d say] – “Sorry I can’t quite hear what you’re saying Kate, but what I can tell you is that…”
She is at pains to make clear that she has fought for every opportunity; from early rejections before landing a post at the Wokingham Times, to repeated rejections for the position of Sky foreign correspondent.
So for budding journalists trying to break into a tough industry she has this advice:
“Keep on striving, and absolutely do not take ‘no’ for an answer”.
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She will be joining us at the Frontline Club in conversation with former BBC executive Vin Ray to take a look back over her career as a foreign correspondent.
]]>Alex Crawford‘s coverage in Libya won her widespread acclaim after she travelled into the conflict with rebel forces. The first journalist to make it into the city of Tripoli after it fell to rebel forces, she coloured her career further with the occasional arrest, detainment, bullet, IED, tear-gassing and mortar shell.
One of the most decorated journalists in the field, Alex Crawford, is the only person to be awarded three Royal Television Society journalist of the Year awards and has recently been presented the James Cameron Memorial Award 2011 for her coverage of the fighting in Libya and the Middle East.
Brought up in Nigeria and Zambia she began her journalistic career working on the Wokingham Times and later joined Sky News in 1989 where she has worked ever since, and is now their Special Correspondent.
She will be joining us at the Frontline Club in conversation with former BBC executive Vin Ray to take a look back over her career as a foreign correspondent.
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We will be discussing Kashmir’s future, the changing role of the foreign correspondent with The Guardian‘s Jonathan Steele, torture and the Arab Spring, and the coming presidential elections in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
A series of Film Africa documentaries look at the people of the Western Sahara and a community of women living in exile after being accused of witchcraft.
There’s a film about the street vendor Mohammed Bouazizi who, by setting himself on fire, sparked an uprising in Tunisia, and another tells the story of the brother of Private McKinley Nolan and his quest to find out the truth about what happened to the missing G.I.s in Vietnam.
Following on from this month’s #fcbbca discussion on Israel, we will be discussing women and the Arab Spring at Westminster College’s Paddington Green Campus.
The focus of our November First Wednesday discussion will be announced on Wednesday 26 October.
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We will be discussing Kashmir’s future, the changing role of the foreign correspondent with The Guardian‘s Jonathan Steele, torture and the Arab Spring, and the coming presidential elections in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
A series of Film Africa documentaries look at the people of the Western Sahara and a community of women living in exile after being accused of witchcraft. There’s a film about the street vendor Mohammed Bouazizi who, by setting himself on fire, sparked an uprising in Tunisia, and another tells the story of the brother of Private McKinley Nolan and his quest to find out the truth about what happened to the missing G.I.s in Vietnam.
Following on from this month’s #fcbbca discussion on Israel, we will be discussing women and the Arab Spring at Westminster College’s Paddington Green Campus. The focus of our November First Wednesday discussion will be announced on Wednesday 26 October.
Follow us on Twitter and catch up on any events you missed on the Forum blogor download our podcasts on iTunes.
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But here are a few incomplete notes on the panel discussion…
1. BBC vs Sky News reporting of Tripoli
I think this has largely been put to bed. The general consensus seems to be that while Correspondent Alex Crawford and her Sky team did a great job of covering the fall of Tripoli, criticism of the BBC’s reporters on the ground was not justified.
ITV’s Bill Neely described flak levelled at the BBC team who decided not to proceed with the rebel convoy as "grossly distasteful". But…
2. BBC: Live vs Bulletins
….we did learn from Kevin Bakhurst, Deputy Head of the BBC Newsroom, that one of the reasons Correspondent Rupert Wingfield-Hayes and his team did not follow the story into Tripoli was because they stopped to file a piece for the Six O’Clock News.
While they were doing this, Bakhurst said they became detached from the rebel convoy and the team adjudged that it would have been highly dangerous to try to rejoin it – "the right decision for the situation they were in".
Of course, the team may still have made a decision that it was not safe to travel with the convoy even if they had not become detached. It is worth pointing out that Rupert Wingfield-Hayes was caught in an ambush the following morning while travelling with the rebels.
Although secondary to safety concerns, therefore, this does nevertheless raise the question of whether the BBC should prioritise rolling news or bulletins.
On the ‘bulletins’ side of the argument is the fact that bulletins have much larger audience figures than rolling news (Ten O’Clock News, 5 million; BBC News Channel 9.6 million per week).
For the ‘rolling news’ case, Sky’s Alex Crawford was deemed to have "owned the story" and there is a feeling that increasingly audiences are consuming news live, a point raised by the BBC’s Jon Leyne. Further research anyone?
3. Blown budgets
It appears that money for international news in 2011 has already run out.
Both Kevin Bakhurst and Sky’s Head of International News, Sarah Whitehead, said they had blown their budgets and had asked bosses for additional funds.
Ben De Pear from Channel 4 News said he had spent his "tiny" budget by July and had been forced to raid the coffers of other departments.
When Bakhurst was asked what he would do if another major international news story broke later in the year he said: "I don’t know".
4. Social Media
(Unless I missed something at the beginning)…there wasn’t much discussion of social media.
Professor Tim Luckhurst argued that the ‘Arab Spring’ had stressed the importance of traditional media journalists. Initially, he was talking about ‘citizen journalists’ not replacing professional reporters which I’d agree with.
But I’m not convinced about the statement that followed from that premise:
"Yes, social media makes a contribution but it makes the least contribution when you need it most. And it cannot always be relied upon. And it can only be relied upon when it is curated by professional journalists".
The first problem here is the identification of ‘social media’ with ‘citizen journalists’ when all and sundry are now using social media – especially professional journalists.
Leaving that aside, the crux of the issue is the idea that people who are not professional journalists make least contribution to the news through social media when ‘we’ need it most. I’m just not sure I agree.
I would argue that generally people who are not professional journalists have much less desire to spend the time, energy, trouble and money to report the news on social media platforms when there is no great pressing need.
The Arab Spring has shown that in the context of state censorship of traditional media and political repression, social media provides a (nevertheless contested) space where people who have a frustrated need to share news, ideas and information can do so.
You might call this a very different form of ‘journalism’.
You might reject that understanding of ‘journalism’, but surely the contribution of these individuals to the news and even ‘traditional journalism’ when ‘we’ needed it, has been rather important (even if their contribution was subsequently often curated and brought to a broader audience by professional journalists)?
It’s both, not one or the other.
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I’d be interested in your thoughts…feel free to comment at Mediating Conflict.
The book launched at the event, Mirage in the Desert? ‘Reporting the Arab Spring’, is available on Amazon and includes a chapter by me on the Gay Girl in Damascus blog.
]]>Frontline Club founder Vaughan Smith has been given a prestigious Bayeux-Calvados award for Blood and Dust, a film shot during 10 days spent with a US Medevac helicopter team in Afghanistan.
The awards, which were launched in 1994, recognise the work of journalists covering conflicts around the world.
Smith’s film, which was shown on Al Jazeera in February this year, won the grand format television category with his coverage of the work of the paramedics of the US Army’s 214th Aviation Regiment.
This year the awards were dominated by Libya, with Sky News’ Alex Crawford’s team announced winners of two awards at an event in north-west France for their reports from Libya’s besieged town of Zawiyah, between 4 to 6 March.
Smith, who has filmed in Afghanistan several times in the past, said he decided to go back because he was concerned that his previous work had shown the machinery of war but not the suffering:
"This being a grevous omission I went back last winter to film US army air ambulances, ‘Dustoff’ helicopters, flying over Marjah in Southern Afghanistan, " he said: "The pictures are strong and show both US marines and Afghan civilians being lifted off the battlefield in equal numbers."
Of his decision to work with Al Jazeera, he said: "I couldn’t find another news broadcaster in Britain that would show the film without cutting out the stronger images. I have huge respect for the way Al Jazeera as a broadcaster engages the world while so many others appear to retreat from it."
Read more about Vaughan Smith in Afghanistan.
]]>For a round up of the latest news check out this list on the Small Wars Journal website.
Here are a few articles that have caught my eye relevant to the reporting of the rebel advance.
The BBC’s reporting
A) Blogger Iain Dale apologises for his tweet about the "wimp of a reporter on the BBC wearing a flak jacket" at the Rixos hotel.
B) BBC: Why war reporters are a breed apart
"Last night in a highly volatile situation, the BBC team in Zawiya, along with other major broadcasters judged it was not safe to continue with the rebels on the road into Tripoli."
C) The convoy that Correspondent Rupert Wingfield-Hayes was travelling with runs into sustained fire from government forces.
Praise for Sky News’ Coverage
Correspondent Alex Crawford wins praise for her live coverage from the advance towards Tripoli facilitated by an Apple Mac Pro, a mini-satellite dish and a car cigarette lighter socket.
The Libyan Blogosphere
An analysis of coverage available on blogs by Global Voices:
"Six months on and it is heartbreaking to look at how eerie the Libyan blogosphere is, row upon row of bloggers in Libya are silent because of the Libyan war. From the silent ones you realize that they are in the cities under Gaddafi control and therefore have no access to the internet."
Libya Twitter list
A useful list of Twitter users in Libya compiled by Mike Hills.
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