In the past twenty years budget cuts across the foreign news industry have seen the near-demise of Western foreign correspondents posted abroad. In their place, local-national stringers have become increasingly important providers of foreign news stories. While the nature of conflicts changes and reporting from high-risk zones becomes more dangerous, the traditional model of the foreign correspondent has shifted. The majority of foreign news is no longer gathered by traditional foreign correspondents posted abroad, but by local nationals who were born and raised in the country they report on.

Is the foreign correspondent an endangered species in the news industry? What new models of foreign reporting are emerging alongside new information-gathering technologies? We will be joined by an expert panel to discuss trends in the industry and the future role of the foreign correspondent.

This is a free ticketed event – attendees must book via the link on this page.

Chair:

Rachael Jolley is the editor of Index on Censorship magazine.

Speakers (full panel announced soon):

Kim Sengupta is Defence Correspondent at The Independent.

Dr Haider Al Safi is a London-based Iraqi journalist and media consultant covering middle eastern politics. He started working as a journalist in 2003 during the American invasion of Iraq and ran the office for The Independent newspaper in Baghdad. Together with his colleagues he covered stories from all over Iraq exposing him to the dangers of war – he was caught in cross-fire, kidnapped and witnessed suicide attacks. He is Executive Producer of Hard-Talk Arabic.

Caroline Lees is a former news and foreign correspondent who has worked as South Asia correspondent for the Sunday Times, covering Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Kashmir and other areas. She has also covered many parts of Africa, including Eritrea for the Economist, the fall of Mobutu in the then Zaire and refugee camps in Goma. She has been an assistant foreign editor at the Sunday Times, Sunday Telegraph, foreign editor at the Sunday Express and Scotland on Sunday. She is now a researcher at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford, and is editor of a Europe-wide network of journalism research platforms, the European Journalism Observatory.

Samira Shackle is a London-based freelance journalist who has reported extensively on Pakistan over the last five years, for publications including the Guardian, Times, Independent, and New Statesman. She has also reported from India, Bangladesh and Kenya for a range of British and international outlets. In 2015 she was shortlisted in the foreign correspondent category in the Words By Woman awards and the New Voices category of the One World Media awards. She was the 2015 recipient of the Times’ Richard Beeston fellowship for foreign reporting.

Arriving in the Deep South of the United States in 1964, Jonathan Steele witnessed the appalling treatment of black Americans. Almost five decades on, The Guardian‘s foreign correspondent says that ‘bearing witness’ to happenings in places as disparate as El Salvador, Russia and Afghanistan still drives his journalism.

With Tom Finn, the Guardian’s correspondent in Yemen, Steele discussed his take on being a foreign correspondent through the prism of his latest book Ghosts of Afghanistan: Hard Truths and Foreign Myths.

Scathing of the US approach in Afghanistan, Steele argues that the Americans continue to make the same mistakes as the USSR just over a decade before. 

Speaking softly but with urgency, Steele only raises his voice to make a point he feels is important:

“The people who bear the greatest responsibility for the misery of Afghanistan in the 1980s, other than Afghans themselves, are the Russians. The people who bear the greatest responsibility for the misery of Afghanistan in the 1990s other than the Afghans themselves are the Americans.”

Thirty years of visits to Afghanistan have left the Guardian journalist with plenty of scope to consider the actions of Russia and the US. 

The ‘ghosts’ of Afghanistan in the title of his book are testament to “wasted lives”; all types of victims of a decades-old conflict.

“The word the Soviet soldiers used for the Mujahideen was ‘Dukhie’ which means ghosts because they were elusive, invisible and hard to get your hands on.”

“The ghosts are the soldiers who died, they are the… over a million Afghani civilians who have died, as well as my memories.” 

Steele argued that greater engagement with the Taliban by both journalists and governments is necessary.

“Responsible journalism gets away from demonisation” he says, but “What do [the Taliban] want? Well we don’t know, there is no contact with the top niche of the Taliban.”

The occupational hazards of working abroad in dangerous areas aren’t limited to stray bullets, he said. They include commonplace things: alcohol, nicotine, depression, and – worst of the bunch – cynicism. 

“Cynicism makes you glib, makes you flip, makes you turn off.”

Its opposite may be curiosity – the most important characteristic of any foreign correspondent said Steele, who added that working as a correspondent may be more difficult now in war zones. 

“In Kosovo you almost did have this feeling that you could cross the lines and you were completely in a different category – like Gods in the Illiad, on the Achilles side one day and on the Trojan side the other"

“Now journalists seem to have a value – there’s a value in taking a journalist hostage… so I think we have been dragged into the battlefield in a way we weren’t ten or fifteen years ago”

The big age difference between Jonathan Steele and Tom Finn crystallises when the role of technology in reporting comes up. 

“If” Finn later replied, “I was witnessing some breaking news and I couldn’t tweet it I would feel incredibly frustrated.”

“Your i-Phone is bearing witness [to events] now,” says Steele, returning to his main theme. “But you need someone to explain them much more".

“Things move on and you have to accept that, there’s good and bad in every era. But I think there will always be scope for the kind of journalism that the BBC or The Guardian tries to put out, and that is providing context.”

By Olivia Heath

Award-winning journalist Jonathan Steele discussed his views on the war in Afghanistan and the changing role of the foreign correspondent on Tuesday night  at the Frontline Club.

“It was a life changing experience for almost everybody including myself. It was radicalising, invigorating and shocking because we saw that this was a different face of America that we had been bought up with.”

Steele talked to the audience about his first break in journalism after being accepted on a traineeship scheme at The Guardian: “Persistence, ambition and a little bit of luck –  in my case it was an enormous dose of luck, about 95 per cent.”

Here’s freelance journalist Graham Holliday‘s presentation on working as a freelance. Graham, who is living in Rwanda where he runs Kigali Wire, a news wire, photojournalism site and blog, discusses freelancing in 2011 and his "five little secrets" about working abroad.

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The rise of a new breed of foreign correspondent, a multimedia-savvy reporter who is comfortable working solo without the backup of a big news organisation – was the topic of Tuesday’s On the Media discussion.

Chaired by Matthew Eltringham, editor of BBC College of Journalism website, the evening began with a video presentation by Graham Holliday, an independent foreign correspondent living in Rwanda.

His slide show gave the audience invaluable information on how to go start freelancing:

My main three rules are: Go somewhere cheap and odd, make yourself visible, and read a lot before you write anything.

Following the film, the panelists shared their experiences, advice and practical know-how.

Kitty Logan, an independent video journalist, focused on the pros and cons of working as an independent journalist.

It is hard to attract interest in a less-known story, you have to fight for the opportunities, and news editors are often reluctant to commission independents in conflict zones.

Commenting on this from a media organisation’s perspective, Ben de Pear, Channel 4 News‘ foreign editor, confirmed the difficulties freelances face:

Channel 4 very rarely commission freelancers. For us to do so, they’d have to be in the right place at the right time, and they’d have to be people who can get us access to stories that no one else can. The stories must be unforgettable.

Because the commissioning organisation has a duty of care towards the journalist, he would never take a finished story which he had declined to commission prior to the journalist going out to the field, he said.

Also sharing his experience on the panel was Frontline Club’s founder Vaughan Smith. He commented on the changing work conditions for an independent journalist:

In the 1980s, freelances had to have a relationship with the established news organisations in order to succeed, but now they do not. A freelance can do well on his own these days; this shift has taken place due to the internet as now almost anyone has the power to become a broadcaster.

Smith added that freelances should insist that media outlets give credit for their work, adding:

It is just as important as any remuneration that you get.

 

This event was in association with the BBC College of Journalism

This report by Bill Neely showing the incredible rescue of Janette Samfour from the ruins of Port-au-Prince in January 2010 won the ITV News international editor a news coverage BAFTA in the same year.

Referring to the "art of the news package" BBC political editor Nick Robinson recently described Bill Neely as one of "the great artists" who could "turn television into magic and use words and pictures like few other people do".

To illustrate his point, Robinson chose Bill Neely‘s reporting of the rescue of Janette Samfour six days after the 12 January earthquake in Haiti, adding that: 

It’s easy to say that anybody who stumbles across somebody whose survived an earthquake could tell that story. Don’t you believe it. It reminds me of that old gag about footballers, the more I practice, the luckier I get. Bill Neely’s either bloody lucky because he still keeps coming across these amazing dramas, or he’s bloody good, and I know which one I think.

That capacity to see that one story as a statement of the wider thing and to stick with it.  Remember, he’s there for three hours, the temptation for the reporter would be to think ‘OK, that’s quite good, let’s get another sequence, then let’s do a piece to camera, then let’s do an ariel shot’.  But to come across this human drama and say let’s stick with it, the amount of guts that takes, with the newsroom saying, is this going to make a piece? What happens if she’d died? Would that make a piece? Or if they got her out in the dark? But he had that instinct to stick with it, stick with it, tell the story. 

Find out more about Bill Neely and his career – and pick up some advice on the craft of television journalism – at our Reflections event on 29 June. You can book here.