Jonathan Miller writes about the "secret weapon" of television news on the Channel 4 World News blog. He’s talking about the fixers he’s worked with in the DRC, Zimbabwe, Gaza, Pakistan, Serbia and Sudan. "When fixers deliver," Miller says, "We make good telly,"

Fixers are all-too-often the unsung heros of our business. They work long hours in sometimes dangerous places. They take risks simply doing what they do. At times, they’re tainted by association with us and have to live with the consequences – long after the foreign journalists they’d been working with have gone.

At times, for example in Zimbabwe, they work with us undercover. If they’re caught, as one of my ITV colleagues pointed out during last night’s awards ceremony, there’s no friendly foreign embassy to bail them out. We pay our fixers well – but I’ve never met one who was only in it for the money. link via @worldnewsblog

This week the Channel 4 team won the award for best International News Coverage at the Royal Television Society awards this week for its reporting of the crisis in the DRC. An award, Miller says, that would not have been possible without the help of the team’s fixer, Robert Chamwami. The Frontline Fixer’s Fund, see the video above, was set up to help the families of those fixers who are killed doing their job.

The Kenji Nagai Award for Journalism was announced at the Burma Media Conference in Chiang Mai, Thailand this week. The Burma Media Association created the award to honour the Japanese video journalist who was killed on the streets of Rangoon by a Burmese soldier during the saffron revolution of September, 2007. The inaugral award goes to imprisoned reporter Eint Khaing Oo, who reported the aftermath of Cyclone Nargis in May, 2008 for the Eco-vision journal,

She was arrested on June 10 last year while covering a peaceful rally by Nargis victims. Police accused her of taking photos of the victims with the intention of sending those pictures to foreign media.

Eint Khaing was charged with committing a crime against public tranquility and sentenced to two years’ imprisonment. According to her lawyer, Khin Maung Shein, she was merely doing her job. The news she reported was based on trustworthy sources and she did not send false news reports to other agencies. She is now in the notorious Insein Prison. link

Photograph of Eint Khaing Oo taken from Reporters without borders.

An undercover film shot in Zimbabwe by Shepherd Yuda, a prison officer, and smuggled out of the country has won the best news programme category in the Broadcast Awards announced last night. The film followed the story of vote rigging during the 2008 election,

Zimbabwe: The Stolen Ballots, a world exclusive broken on the guardian.co.uk website in July last year and also broadcast on BBC2’s Newsnight, showed a Mugabe supporter getting prison officers to fill in their postal ballots in his presence.
The film was shot in Zimbabwe capital Harare’s central jail by prison officer Shepherd Yuda and smuggled out of the country by him. Yuda later fled the country with his family.
This is believed to be the first time a UK newspaper has won a Broadcast award. link

Just in case it had slipped your notice, but tonight the Frontline Club will be hosting the 2007 Kurt Schork Awards in International Journalism,

This year’s winners are the late Sahar Al-Haideri, an Iraqi freelance journalist and IWPR trainee who paid the ultimate price for her commitment to journalism – and German freelancer Mario Kaiser who followed a story no editor dared commission. The awards were established in memory of Kurt Schork, the widely-admired journalist who was killed in Sierra Leone while on assignment for Reuters. link

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A couple of weeks old maybe, but here’s Mark Forbe’s, who works as a foreign correspondent for The Age, accepting the Australasian Society for Traumatic Stress Studies 2007 Media Award for his reporting from Indonesia,

Forbes received the award for his coverage of the Garuda Airlines crash at Yogyakarta Airport in March that killed 22 people, including five Australians. The award recognises excellence in journalistic reporting of traumatic events in any media. Felicity May, chairwoman of the judging panel and member of the Committee of Management of ASTSS, said: "What made Mark Forbes’ story so compelling was that Mr Forbes was a participant in the event. He was one of the first on the scene, rescuing survivors, identifying the dead and arranging the medical evacuation of the badly injured. A number of the dead and injured were close personal friends and colleagues." link