The vulnerability of journalists to kidnappings was starkly illustrated by the killing of James Foley and Steven Sotloff by Islamic militants in 2014. Their murder underscored the risks taken by journalists and news organisations trying to cover developments in dangerous regions of the world and has forced news enterprises to more clearly prepare for and confront issues of safety.

We will be discussing how news organisations prepare for and respond to the risk of kidnap, and how insurers, victim recovery firms, journalists’ families, and governments influence the actions of news enterprises – and why freelancers are particularly at risk.

This event will be chaired by Richard Sambrook, chairman of INSI, senior research fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism and author of Reporting Dangerously: Journalist Killings, Intimidation and Security.

The panel:

Nicolas Hénin is a French freelance journalist who has reported on conflicts in Iraq, Sudan, Somalia and Yemen. In June 2013 he was kidnapped by Daesh militants in the Syrian city of Raqqa. He was held captive for eleven months until his release in April 2014, and was held alongside other Western hostages including James Foley, Steven Sotloff, Alan Henning and David Haines – all of whom were killed by the extremist group. He is the author of Jihad Academy: The Rise of Islamic State, published in 2015.

Colin Pereira is Director of HP Risk Management and Head of High Risk Security for ITN. He started out as an analyst at the BBC and left a decade later as Deputy Head of the Security team. He has managed and developed risk management structures and training programmes for a number of organisations and manages journalists and filmmakers working on the frontline on a daily basis.

Hannah Storm is director of INSI and author of The Kidnapping of Journalists: Reporting from High-Risk Conflict Zones and No Woman’s Land: On the Frontlines with Female Reporters.

James Harkin writes for Vanity Fair, Harper’s Magazine and Newsweek and is the author of Hunting Season, about the rise of Islamic State and its campaign of kidnapping.

All attendees will receive a free copy of The Kidnapping of Journalists: Reporting from High-Risk Conflict Zones.

On Wednesday 18 November, Sacha Pfeiffer and Mike Rezendes from The Boston Globe’s Pulitzer-prize winning Spotlight team discussed their 2002 exposé of the Catholic Church sex abuse scandal, the subject of the new film Spotlight. They spoke to Richard Sambrook, former head of BBC News and director of the centre for journalism at Cardiff University, and were joined by the film’s  director Tom McCarthy and co-writer Josh Singer.

.@frontlineclub @SachaPfeiffer & @MikeRezendes discuss the @BostonGlobe sexual abuse investigation @SpotlightMovie pic.twitter.com/5sJmnkmw5D

— Paolo Ganino (@paologanino) November 18, 2015

At the start of the discussion, Pfeiffer and Rezendes stressed the importance of good investigative journalism and the role it plays in uncovering institutional injustices. Pfeiffer noted that investigative journalism is becoming “an endangered species.”

“It has to survive,” Rezendes said, “as it is critical to democratic societies.”

The Spotlight investigation in 2002 exposed the Catholic Church’s cover-up of paedophilia offences committed by more than 70 priests in Boston. With evidence gathered from church registries and court files, the Spotlight team thrust the sex abuse scandal into the public domain.

Rezendes said: “Documentation was the spine of our story. Our investigation was bulletproof because of the church documents which proved it was a systematic cover up that had lasted 30 years.”

The journalists convinced a judge to release the criminal prosecution files of Catholic Roman priests who had sexually abused minors. Rezendes said: “We argued that the church’s right to privacy was overruled by the public’s right to know what was in those files.”

The legal victory of the Spotlight team established an important precedent for disclosing abuse by the clergy and holding the church accountable.

When asked about the public reaction to the investigation, Pfeiffer responded: “We were really surprised. We were worried about protesters outside The Boston Globe’s offices. There were none.”

She then recounted how a Catholic priest had told her the report “was painful, but necessary.”

Rezendes added: “Our investigation unleashed a tidal wave of anger. Anger directed not at us, but at cardinal law.”

Both journalists commented on how impressed they were with the film adaptation for its realistic and honest portrayal of their work. Sambrook noted that the protagonists in the film, played by Rachel McAdams and Mark Ruffalo, aren’t extrovert reporters but believable and restrained characters – “not what you would expect from a Hollywood film. A lot of the acting was in silent eyes.”

McCarthy responded: “Authenticity was always the catchword. We weren’t interested in Hollywood dramatisation. We became enamoured with the craft of reporting… We found all the tedious, monotonous work reporters do fascinating.”

Great to talk to @SachaPfeiffer & @MikeRezendes about @SpotlightMovie at @frontlineclub tonight – urge you to see it on release in Jan

— Richard Sambrook (@sambrook) November 18, 2015

An audience member asked how the reporters found victims who were willing to speak openly about their experience. Pfeiffer acknowledged the difficulty in encouraging victims to speak out: “They ran the risk of being shunned and ostracised. Those who did speak up broke the dam.”

Constructing a two hour film about a five month investigation was “challenging,” said McCarthy. “But we had the best helpers in the world.”

Filming was very much a collobarative effort between the actors and journalists. Pfeiffer and Rezendes spent a lot of time with their respective actors, Rachel McAdams and Mark Ruffalo. “We thought it was just social time,” Pfeiffer joked, “but we were being closely studied and mimicked.”

One of the audience members was a representative of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP). He thanked the journalists and filmmakers for shedding list on the sex abuse scandal, but said that the church was still unwilling to listen to recommendations from organisation such as SNAP.

Singer said: “We had two aims when making this movie: to get everyone to go out and buy their local paper and to highlight the need for greater transparency in the church.”

Spotlight will be released in the UK on 29 January 2016.

What are journalists worth in an age where anyone can tell their own story online? Has their diminishing value led to the growing violence against journalists across the world? This is the argument that executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), Joel Simon, put forward at the Frontline Club on Tuesday 17 March. Following the release of his latest book, A New Censorship: Inside the Global Battle for Media Freedom, Simon joined an engaged audience to discuss the reasons behind this ongoing diminishing of press freedom on a global scale. The discussion spanned from the current global spike in the murder, kidnapping and intimidation of journalists, to the futility of media blackouts, to the ways in which the internet has permanently changed the face of the news industry.

l-r: Richard Sambrook and Joel Simon

Speaking to Richard Sambrook, Director of Journalism at Cardiff University and chairman of the International News Safety Institute (INSI), Simon pointed to a paradox: access to overwhelming amounts of information blinding people to the urgency of the crisis in press freedom.

“We’re so deluged by information that I think we fail to see the ways in which censorship and repression are actually creating gaps in the essential knowledge that we need,” said Simon.

Using case studies of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey, Simon‘s book demonstrates how repressive governments use systems of state control to undermine the work of the press.

Sambrook agreed, and added that, “Increasingly, journalism is becoming politicised and the danger is growing of falling on the wrong side of oppressive regimes.”

In situations such as that in IS-controlled areas of Syria and Iraq, journalists are now seen as targets, rather than tools to spread messages, commented Simon. Changes in technology that have allowed anyone to share their own message online have also robbed journalists of their monopoly on disseminating information, he said. Simon noted a clear correlation between increased numbers of people active online and greater threats posed to press freedom.

“The value of journalists as individuals is diminished and that makes them more vulnerable. I believe that’s one of the reasons we’re seeing this spike in violence and this spike in repression.”

In the past, kidnapped journalists were able to argue their usefulness to captors by arguing that they were an invaluable tool for communicating their stories.

“If a journalist said that to IS they’d be laughed out of the room,” said Simon.

The discussion then moved to the frequent media blackouts that are actioned when journalists are kidnapped, under the pretence of allowing direct negotiations to take place. Simon, however, argued that these blackouts only allow captors, such as ISIS, to assume full control of the narrative.

We need to overturn the default press blackout on difficult news events. Coverage should be the default @Joelcpj @frontlineclub

— Tom Jeffery (@tdwjeffery) March 17, 2015

The wide-ranging discussion also looked at the problem of Western governments prioritising national security over freedom of expression in the wake of recent terror attacks on journalists at the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo in Paris.

“I think the freedom of expression coalition lasted a couple of days and it’s been replaced by a national security coalition,” said Simon, and pointed to increased powers of state surveillance introduced in the UK within days of the attack.

To tackle the current crisis of press freedom, Simon proposed a broad alliance between journalists and all groups with an interest in ensuring the free flow of information.

“We need to form a grand coalition between all the forces which have a stake in ensuring that information flows freely,” he said.

Only with the help of the global business and technology communities, NGOs and like-minded governments could journalists make headway in preserving the fundamental right to free speech, he said.

More information on The New Censorship: Inside the Global Battle for Freedom of Expression is available here.

Watch and listen back below:

What is the future of news? Will the public know more or less in the internet age? These questions were the focus of a panel discussion marking the launch of the autumn issue of Index on Censorship magazine at the Frontline Club on Wednesday 22 October.

Shrinking international news budgets, bureau closures, the rise of the freelancer and the citizen journalist all made for gloomy prognoses for the business-as-usual news model, agreed the panel chaired by The Times columnist, David Aaronovitch.

From left: David Aaronovitch, Amie Ferris-Rotman, Rachel Briggs and Richard Sambrook in conversation at the Frontline Club.

In the internet age, where journalists are no longer exclusive gate-keepers of publishing platforms, access to unprecedented amounts of information had not necessarily resulted in better informed audiences, said Richard Sambrook, director of Cardiff University’s journalism centre.

“One of the paradoxes is that we have more information out there than ever and less trust in it than ever,” he said.

Reuters correspondent Amie Ferris-Rotman said the days of traditional foreign correspondents and news agencies parachuting foreign reporters in to do “white saviour journalism” were numbered.

She urged news agencies to invest in training local staff who “often produce better stories simply because they know their countries better”. Above all, the industry must resist ‘deprofessionalisation’.

“Because of what’s happened with the internet people think [journalism is] a hobby, something you should get for free,” said Ferris-Rotman. “This is totally unacceptable. If we don’t change this the world will suffer enormously and get less of a full picture.”

South African freelance journalist and trainer Raymond Joseph then joined the discussion via Skype. He told of efforts to reach remote communities by building investigative tools to gather user generated content.

Joseph said the challenge for journalists was to cut through the “cacophony” of social media noise and empower audiences to become competent news gatherers:

“Increasingly we’re digging up those voices. But we’re going to have to do the journalism because with all those voices out there we have to sort the news from the noise.”

Yet another perspective was offered by Rachel Briggs, director of Hostage UK, an NGO working with hostages and their families.

Briggs said new platforms had empowered news subjects to publish their message directly, highlighting the example of Mike Haines, who turned to YouTube to address audiences after IS militants murdered his brother David Haines.

But Briggs warned these platforms were also available to “the bad guys” with IS now “effectively running its own news channel”. Access to such graphic content presented new challenges to editorial judgement, she said, not only in news rooms but also for users of social media.

In the discussion that followed, the panel agreed that the explosion of raw information online was both a blessing and a curse for journalists, whose skills of objective verification were now needed more than ever.

“We’ve got a whole world opened up to us but it’s a very dangerous world if we’re just going to dive into it,” said Joseph, and praised the rise of verification tools and agencies.

“The same rules apply that have always applied,” said Ferris-Rotman. “If you’re a good journalist you’ve live by certain principles, you’ve been trained a certain way to think objectively to have freedom of bias, to present a nuanced view of events.”

This was the enduring value of journalistic principles, said Sambrook, in an age where the lines were increasingly blurred for audiences between journalism, PR, propaganda, advertising and lobbying.

“In this new environment if [the public] don’t understand that difference there’s a problem. . . . they’re consuming junk food without realising it.”

You can watch the event and listen again here:

On Wednesday 22 October, the autumn issue of Index on Censorship magazine launched at the Frontline Club. The magazine’s editor, Rachael Jolley, introduced the issue and handed over to author and columnist, David Aaronovitch, who chaired the accompanying debate on the future of journalism.

Aaronovitch initiated the discussion by asking each panellist to speak individually on the future of journalism before inviting the audience to partake.

Rachael Jolly (right) gives an introduction and speaks briefly on the Index on Censorship magazine launch.

Richard Sambrook, professor and director of the Centre for Journalism at Cardiff University and former Director of BBC World Service, suggested that we will be better informed “if we want to be”. The panel and the audience returned repeated to this theme that we now have access to more information than ever before, but also have to be more discerning about the source of that news.

In our technology-led society, it is becoming increasingly difficult to differentiate journalists from citizen reporters. And Raymond Joseph, former editor of the South African Sunday Times, who joined the panel via Skype from South Africa, said that we must ask numerous questions before trusting a source: “How do you know? Who do you know? What do you know?”

“Today you need to be platform agnostic,” Joseph continued. “You need to separate news from the noise.”

While everyone agreed that Twitter was a powerful journalistic tool that journalists couldn’t afford not to use, Sambrook also took to task how we define journalism. He debated whether “any expression in the public space is journalism”, and concluded that “just because you heard something doesn’t make it journalism . . . it is raw information”. It is what you do with it that matters.

From left: David Aaronovitch, Amie Ferris-Rotman, Rachael Briggs and Richard Sambrook.

Rachel Briggs, Director of Hostage UK, said that the public is also beginning to lose trust in the media and this is somewhat due to people being “fed up with the way . . . the media is so mediated”.

Media sources are also unwilling to invest in hiring local reporters in other countries. “Foreign reporting still relies unfortunately on the . . . model of the white saviour, often male,” said Amie Ferris-Rotman, former correspondent for Reuters in Afghanistan and Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University. But she also revealed the startling statistic that the “British media has 40% less international coverage than it did 30 years ago.”

Aaronovitch said that “[news] organisations become almost completely disconnected from abroad” as they do not know or understand information to the same extent as local journalists.

A panel of young and future journalists joined the experts with fresh ideas. Priyanka Mogul, Journalism and Human Rights student at Kingston University, said that with the huge amount of information available, at least it is “becoming impossible to be someone who doesn’t know what is going on”.

Jodie Ginsberg, CEO of Index on Censorship, commented on the youth panel:

The @Index_Magazine launch youth panel on #futurejournalism has been fabulous – insightful, optimistic and challenging

— Jodie Ginsberg (@jodieginsberg) October 22, 2014

You can watch the event and listen again here:

Showcase is a new event that incorporates the best of Frontline: compelling debate, inquisitive film, insightful discussion, thought-provoking surroundings, stimulating company and refreshing beverages. The evenings will feature two sessions of film or discussion with a break between when you will be welcomed into the members’ clubroom. Here you can meet your fellow audience members and enjoy a drink courtesy of Chivas Brothers.

For the first in the series we will be exploring the newly launched VICE News. The evening will begin by looking at the content they are producing. A panel of VICE News journalists will present and discuss their work.

Following the break we will be bringing together journalists and editors from VICE News and other more established news outlets to discuss the changing news landscape and the place for new platforms and styles of reporting.

Both sessions will be chaired by Richard Gizbert, presenter of The Listening Post on Al Jazeera English.

An Introduction to VICE News with:

Aris Roussinos, producer and host at VICE News. He was awarded the Rory Peck Award for News in November 2013 for his VICE film Ground Zero: Mali. He is currently writing a book about his experiences with rebel armies, which will be published by Random House later this year.

Milène Larsson, producer and host at VICE News. She has been working for VICE for almost a decade. Previously European managing editor, she now primarily produces and hosts news documentaries, such as the award winning Israel’s Radical Left, Istanbul Rising and Young and Gay in Putin’s Russia. She also helped produce the Emmy nominated VICE series on HBO.

Alex Miller is the editor in chief at VICE, and has recently presented and produced investigative news documentaries on the violent protests in Caracas, the fallout of the economic crisis in Greece, as well as video interviews with Clive Stafford Smith and Slavoj Žižek.

The Changing News Landscape with:

Richard Sambrook, professor of journalism and director at the Centre for Journalism, Cardiff University. He is a former director of Global News at the BBC where he worked as a journalist for 30 years as a producer, editor and manager.

Kevin Sutcliffe, VICE head of news production for Europe and former editor of Channel 4’s Dispatches.

Richard James is the news editor of BuzzFeed UK. He was previously the deputy online editor at Metro. Prior to that, he was the technology editor and SEO Executive at Metro. He has also worked at Daily Mail Online and Inthenews.co.uk.

Tom Giles, editor of BBC current affairs programme, Panorama. He joined the BBC in 1991 on World Service Radio and went on to work on the Nine O’clock News, Newsnight, Panorama, Horizon and, for Current Affairs, on series such as BBC2’s Andrew Marr’s History of Modern Britain, Hooligans, The White Season, BBC Three’s Women, Weddings War and Me, and BBC factual drama development.

Your wonderful and kind messages mean so much to us, as has your friendship, council and support over so many years. There is no prize in our trade that we could ever value as much as your belief in us.

– Vaughan and Pranvera Smith

 

Thank you to Stewart Purvis, Richard Gizbert, Tina Carr, Emma Beals, Allan Little, Mani, Stuart Hughes, Richard Sambrook, Jon Snow, Marina Litvinenko, Martin Bell, Tom Fenton, Anthony Loyd, Lyse Doucet, Bill Neely, Lindsey Hilsum, Charles Glass, John G Morris, Salim Amin, Liz Palmer Gary Knight, Jon Lee Anderson, Jeremy Bowen, Matt Frei and Jean-Jacques Gonfier.

With the dangers of reporting and documenting conflict or uprisings claiming many lives every year, drones seem to be a practical and safe alternative to otherwise dangerous missions. On Wednesday 20 November, the Frontline Club hosted a panel discussion chaired by Richard Sambrook, professor of journalism  at Cardiff University and a former BBC Global News director. The five-person panel debated the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in the field, touching on ethics, law and the safety, as well as the advantages, it brings to journalism.

L-R: Tom Hannen, Professor Robert Picard, David Goldberg, Gerry Corbett and Richard Sambrook. Photo: Greta Hoffman

The evening started with a demonstration by Tom Hannen, a senior innovations producer at the BBC’s Global Video Unit, who brought along an actual drone and showed the audience how to fly it. He explained:

“We are starting small and simple with this at the BBC, so we’ve been looking at wide open spaces, agricultural stories, all these wide open spaces in a controlled environment. We’re primarily using them for filming features rather than on the ground news gathering. . . . The last thing you want to be doing in a place where people are already shooting is putting a beacon up above you saying ‘We’re just here’.”

The BBC, however, is only one of a number media agencies and private companies investigating the use of drones. This means that there might be a need for new legal guidelines to regulate their use. David Goldberg, a legal and regulatory specialist for Unmanned Experts, addressed this issue:

“What we are actually looking at here is the general right to photograph . . . this is a general right that does not require permission. There was a statement made by Lord Bassam in 2008 . . . saying that the taking of photographs in a public place is not subject to any rules or statute. There is no legal presumption of privacy for someone in a public place.”

Even though the use of drones seems to be legal, Professor Robert Picard, director of research at the Reuters Institute in Oxford and a world-leading specialist on media economics and government media policies, said that there were many ethical issues to be considered:

“We are increasingly offered images from third parties and this is going to create a lot of ethical issues, because we need to think about the conditions under which those visual images were obtained. Were they obtained by violating laws? Were they obtained by breaking expectations of privacy?”

One member of the audience asked what would happen if in the future journalists stepped back from control and the drones would fly autonomously. Robert Picard said:

“They do have that now, primarily in military operations. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t. It was one of the great problems the US military had when invading Iraq.”

Gerry Corbett, who works for the Civil Aviation Authority Safety and Airspace Regulation Group, added:

“A general requirement at the moment is that all aircraft have to have a person in charge to control them. . . . The trouble that comes with autonomous unmanned aircrafts is who is responsible for the aircraft at the point when it crashes? The programmer?”

https://soundcloud.com/frontlineclub/drone-journalism-the-future-of

The Iranian Election was the moment when Twitter “exploded into our consciousness as a really powerful newsgathering tool” Adrian Wells told the Frontline Club earlier this week. Sky’s Foreign Editor was discussing how media organisations cover ‘news black holes’ with Richard Sambrook, Head of Global News at the BBC, and Jean Seaton, professor of Media History at the University of Westminster.

Twitter and Iran

Sky used Cover It Live to feed the tweets of Iranian twitterers directly onto their news website. Commenting on the difficulties of verifying material on Twitter, Wells said Sky spent a lot of time digging and only used the feeds of twitterers who were “relevant”, “topical” and “were there”. He said Sky had to “weed out” inaccurate twitterers and tracked down one Iranian twitterer to Streatham, Southern Iran London. (Which must have been a disappointment).

Of course, the location setting on Twitter is user-controlled and at one point during the protests there was a call for twitterers around the world to confuse the Iranian authorities by changing their location to Tehran. Not ideal for the journalist trying to make sense of what was going on.

Despite Sky’s best efforts and general confidence that they could identify authentic twitterers, Wells admitted that he couldn’t be absolutely sure of who was twittering. He also said he did not know if twitterers had been informed that their accounts were being permanently displayed on Sky’s website during the crisis.

Sky’s use of Twitter was important to their coverage of Iran because foreign correspondent, Tim Marshall was asked to leave the country. Wells said Sky ‘didn’t have many options’ and turned to user generated content and material being published on Twitter.

The BBC encountered similar problems. Richard Sambrook had started the discussion by outlining the background to Jon Leyne’s eviction from Iran. Highlighting Iran’s sensitivity to domestic rather than international media coverage, Sambrook said the Iranian authorities started to fall out with the BBC when Persian TV started broadcasting inside Iran.

He said the authorities also put pressure on news agencies and the Associated Press told the BBC that Persian TV could not use AP material. Reuters, on the other hand, ignored the threats and continued to provide Persian TV with reports.

During the protests, the BBC were receiving between 6 and 8 video clips a minute from Iranians. A journalist from Persian TV in the room noted that journalists at the station spent hours rewinding and playing video to try to verify its authenticity.

Sambrook said there was a number of verification concerns and security issues, while balancing the story was also a problem as President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s supporters were less likely to publish online.

(I’d be interested to know if this was a feature of English-language participation rather than ‘online’ per se. Harvard’s study of the Persian blogosphere suggests there are a wealth of blogs that might support Ahmadinejad.)

I did find that some kind of strange balance on Iran could be achieved if you watched different media outlets. I remember the rather bizarre experience of watching the BBC’s live TV pictures from the large pro-Ahmadinejad rally which was organised by the Iranian authorities next to a screen following relevant hashtags on Twitter of a smaller concurrent opposition protest.

At that moment in time, I was witnessing two completely different stories and looking at only one or the other would have provided a very distorted picture. Because of the nature of English language Iranian twittering there was less concern with the pro-Ahmadinejad rally, or if there was it wasn’t positive, while reporting restrictions imposed on the BBC by Iran made it difficult for them to cover the opposition protest on the BBC. Although they did manage it to some extent.

‘Embedding’ in online culture to verify material

Various other underreported areas of the world were identified during the discussion including Africa, Burma, Afghanistan, Gaza, Tibet, North Korea, Sri Lanka and Darfur.* In the context of Iran, Jean Seaton maintained that the fundamental principles of verifying material remained the same as in the past.

This argument has a number of merits, although I think Kate Day’s piece in the Telegraph provides the beginnings of a more practical approach to how social media could be used when trying to report areas that are difficult to access. Unfortunately these ideas were not really discussed at the Club:

“Journalists need to do more to plug into the networks that exist around a subject (or a place) as a routine part of their working life rather than joining the conversation as a big story breaks. In this case, someone with a deep knowledge of the Iranian blogosphere would at least have trusted sources from within these networks to help them make a more sophisticated judgement about the reliability of the content coming from users. They would better understand the method of communication as well as knowing more about the forces at play.

No editor would send a novice to the lobby and expect them to separate the story from the spin on their first day. Equally, journalists need to do more to understand the context and nuances of communities online before they have a hope of separating interesting gems of information from the noise.”

Essentially journalists need to be ’embedded’ in online culture in order to make best use of the material coming out of places that are difficult to access through other means.

Building trust and relationships with sources is what journalists have always done; the information potential of the Web demands that they also do so in the online field, particularly if that process one day helps a journalist to provide a vital window on an underreported story.

*Did I hear anyone mention South America?