In October the Frontline Club held a tenth anniversary exhibition at the Prix Bayeux Awards and on 13 November they welcomed Prix Bayeux to London for an event to celebrate their twentieth anniversary. The event brought together past winners who each presented their distinguished pieces of reporting and looked back on 20 years of reporting conflict.

The evening was opened by Jon Swain, award winning journalist and guest president of the Prix Bayeux jury, who explained how the awards are very much about the work produced rather than, as is often the case, who knows who. The discussion was chaired by Frontline Club founder and 2011 Bayeux-Calvados award winner, Vaughan Smith.

L-R Vaughan Smith, Adrien Jaulmes, Neil Connery, Christina Lamb and Jeremy Bowen

Jeremy Bowen, BBC Middle East editor and winner of the award in 2009 for reporting on the aftermath of the 2009 Gaza War for BBC1’s Panorama. He accompanied a doctor from Gaza who lost several daughters and a niece in an Israeli shelling, the terrible irony being that he had spent a lot of his career working for peace with Israel:

“I went around the room and he told me where they were laying. I thought that if I’d put it in a more factual manner, it would have more impact. It worked out in that sense but as ever, one of the ambivalences [of war reporting] is that we report on the back of someone else’s tragedy.”

Great panel with @PrixBayeux winners @frontlineclub tonight, note the temporary exhibition with winning photos. pic.twitter.com/T9Wx25Efqc

— wotienke (@wotienke) November 13, 2013

Christina Lamb, author and journalist with The Sunday Times and winner of the award in 2009, read from Mission Impossible, an account of her time as an embedded journalist with the British military in Afghanistan. Mentioning the Green Book that requires reporters to have their copy pre-approved by military press officers, Lamb reflected:

“There’s a fine line between that and censorship. We [journalists] failed because we should have gotten up against it, all of us.”

Prix Bayeux exhibited photographs from previous winners of the award during the evening. [picture credit: Caroline Schmitt]

“The vast majority of people involved in news-gathering who are injured or killed are locals to that country. They’re not only journalists, but drivers, translators. . . . We as an industry have a huge moral responsibility for those people and I wonder whether we really deliver that as much as we need to.”

Adrien Jaulmes, reporter with Le Figaro and winner of the Bayeux-Calvados award in 2007, he said of reporting in Syria:

“Your moral duty is to share the dangers while you’re there. Journalists suddenly become the targets in big cities because they have money, and that changed the game for us within weeks.”

Watch and listen back here:

https://soundcloud.com/frontlineclub/twenty-years-of-war-reporting

“Today, guidance is more vital than ever. At the extreme, it saves lives. It can mean the difference between insipid insight and getting things dead wrong,” said Mort Rosenblum, reading aloud from his new book Little Bunch of Madmen on international reporting last night. “Trial and error is no way to cover events that help shape the course of a planet.”

“In a changed world, we need new frames of reference,” continued Rosenblum who was flanked by Tom Fenton and Jon Swain, both experienced bureau hands like himself.

The book is in part a tribute to the ‘old gang’ members, but Rosenblum is also dedicated to ‘the new guard’:

Last night’s Frontline Club crowd was suitably full of young faces eager to pick up all they could from this seasoned correspondent who started his reporting career in 1965 and has run AP bureaus in the Congo, West Africa, Southeast Asia, Argentina and France. He was also editor of the International Herald Tribune in Paris.

First he had some good news: “It’s never been so easy,” said Rosenblum, before adding that “you just have to be willing to starve to death for a while.”

“It’s not a question of experience, it’s a question of getting it.” Rosenblum continued. Asked if it’s still possible to find work by simply going sonewhere and winging it, the general consensus was affirmative – although Jon Swain advised building a relationship with foreign editors beforehand.

“It’s all a question of your own hustle,” Rosenblum agreed.“Taking a few chances, but not dumb ones.”

The discussion turned to an article written by the Independent’s Patrick Cockburn on the failures of embedded frontline journalism.

Reporters, said Rosenblum, “need the ability to move around the battlefield and just do it”. However,  Swain argued, good reporters “can see through the bullshit”.

The panel was also asked if the agreed with Reuters editor-in-chief David Schlesinger’s recent claim that ‘We must be ready to lose some stories to avoid losing yet more lives.’

The answer was a resounding ‘no’: “The news game is a dangerous business,that’s something we should be prepared to take,” said Swain, who pointed out that in Cambodia, the casualties had been much higher:

“We lost 11 in one day,” he said, adding that the story was always considered more important, the risk an accepted fact.

Discussing the internet and social media, Fenton made the point that they give the impression that there is more news, when in fact there are fewer journalists in the field producing less high-quality journalism. “It’s good to have a news flash, but you’ve got to have boots on the ground,” he said.

Picking out the young faces in the crowd, Fenton said: “If I were your age, I’d go for it. There’ll be a need for you. There is a need for information. The basic craft is something we really can’t do without.”

“Handing in a story. That’s the fucking Pulitzer for me,” said Rosenblum to murmurs of agreement from the master craftsmen on both sides.