Female photographers on deadliest front lines
Sprinting for her life as the Taliban sprayed bullets at her in open ground, Alison Baskerville had to rely on the covering fire of British soldiers to ensure she didn’t die in Afghanistan.
Caught in an ambush, she was forced to dive for cover, only pausing when coalition air support arrived to scare the enemy away.
But Baskerville is not a soldier. She is one of a growing number of female photographers putting themselves on the front line of conflicts across the world, to capture at times what their male counterparts can’t.
‘From the streets of Paris to the outposts of Iraq, women are now fighting along side men and now photographing alongside them also,’ the 41-year-old respected war photographer and former sergeant in the RAF told MailOnline.
‘Times are changing, and some of the women I have seen in this industry are brave and confident. They put themselves in danger and challenge the stereotype of women and war.’
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How Stories Deceive
On the afternoon of October 10, 2013, an unusually cold day, the streets of downtown Dublin were filled with tourists and people leaving work early. In their midst, one young woman stood out. She seemed dazed and distressed as she wandered down O’Connell Street, looking around timidly, a helpless-seeming terror in her eyes. She stopped in front of the post office, or, as locals would have it, the G.P.O. Standing between the thick columns, she looked even more forlorn. She was dressed in a purple hoodie under a gray wool sweater; tight, darkly colored jeans; and flat, black shoes. Her face was ashen. She was shivering. A passerby, stunned by her appearance, asked if she needed help. She looked at him mutely, as if not quite grasping the essence of the question. Somebody called the police. An officer from the Store Street garda station answered the call. He took her to a hospital. It seemed the best thing to do.
She was a teen-ager—fourteen or fifteen, at most. At five feet six, she weighed just more than eighty-eight pounds. Her long, blond hair covered a spiny, battered back. Once she did talk, some days later, it became clear that she had only the most rudimentary grasp of English—not enough to say who she was or why she’d appeared as she had. But the girl could draw. And what she drew made her new guardians catch their breaths. One stifled a gasp. One burst out crying. There she was, a small stick-like figure, being flown to Ireland on a plane. And there she was again, lying on a bed, surrounded by multiple men. She seemed to be a victim of human trafficking—one of the lucky ones who had somehow managed to escape.
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The World According to Men
ISTANBUL—For most of the 19th and 20th centuries, women war correspondents were rare creatures—considered intellectual oddities, more likely to be fetishized than taken seriously as news gatherers.
Even as recently as 2002, Vanity Fair was delighting in the exoticism of such women in its story “Girls at the Front,” which profiled the battle-hardened correspondents Christiane Amanpour, Janine di Giovanni, and Marie Colvin. They had sex appeal and well-furnished London homes, and they made up a small brigade of female journalists jetting off to “whatever hellhole leads the news.”
These days, there are so many “girls at the front” that it’s not a story anymore. The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Associated Press all have female bureau chiefs reporting on ISIS, Syria, Yemen, Egypt, and Libya. In Istanbul, a jumping-off point for covering the region, there seem to be more women freelance correspondents than men. This month’s new film Whisky Tango Foxtrot, in which Tina Fey plays an adrenaline-addicted reporter in Afghanistan, captures how women have broken into the tightly knit, elite foreign-correspondents’ club.
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How technology disrupted the truth
One Monday morning last September, Britain woke to a depraved news story. The prime minister, David Cameron, had committed an “obscene act with a dead pig’s head”, according to the Daily Mail. “A distinguished Oxford contemporary claims Cameron once took part in an outrageous initiation ceremony at a Piers Gaveston event, involving a dead pig,” the paper reported. Piers Gaveston is the name of a riotous Oxford university dining society; the authors of the story claimed their source was an MP, who said he had seen photographic evidence: “His extraordinary suggestion is that the future PM inserted a private part of his anatomy into the animal.”
The story, extracted from a new biography of Cameron, sparked an immediate furore. It was gross, it was a great opportunity to humiliate an elitist prime minister, and many felt it rang true for a former member of the notorious Bullingdon Club. Within minutes, #Piggate and #Hameron were trending on Twitter, and even senior politicians joined the fun: Nicola Sturgeon said the allegations had “entertained the whole country”, while Paddy Ashdown joked that Cameron was “hogging the headlines”. At first, the BBC refused to mention the allegations, and 10 Downing Street said it would not “dignify” the story with a response – but soon it was forced to issue a denial. And so a powerful man was sexually shamed, in a way that had nothing to do with his divisive politics, and in a way he could never really respond to. But who cares? He could take it.
Then, after a full day of online merriment, something shocking happened. Isabel Oakeshott, the Daily Mail journalist who had co-written the biography with Lord Ashcroft, a billionaire businessman, went on TV and admitted that she did not know whether her huge, scandalous scoop was even true. Pressed to provide evidence for the sensational claim, Oakeshott admitted she had none.
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How It Ends
The windows are open, and I’m driving my mother-in-law’s car, a turquoise compact number that’s festooned with bumper stickers like “Namaste,” “Peace,” and “Save the Tatas.” I’m free, free from my child for the first time in weeks, free from my husband, free from the little rented bungalow on the adorable street where the blue skies are almost oppressive. I’ve been back in the U.S. for exactly two weeks, and this trip away from it all, up Venice Boulevard, feels like a Carnival cruise.
I’m kind of a terrible driver. Turns out I haven’t spent much time at the wheel of a car in the past handful of years. For a long time that job went to other people: cynical, sarcastic, sometimes burly, sometimes handsome, always charming men — men I would hire by the day or the week or the month.
There was Ahmed, in Baghdad, who drove NPR’s armored Toyota pickup. He was big and round and baby-faced and soft-spoken and reasonable, with a Hitler-like mustache you would recognize if you’ve spent any time in Iraq. I want to say we were as close as siblings, but I knew that could never be true. Still, from the day I met him, my first day on the job as Baghdad bureau chief in 2010, I knew we would die for each other if we had to.
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On #Tronc, Journalism, & its Value
When I was in college a couple of journo kids a few years older than me decided to start their own sports publication. They called it N2U, and earnestly explained that it meant they were “into” the “university.”
(It was the ’90s, kids. Everything sounded like this.)
When it launched, the publishers of N2U had to spend half the day on the phone translating the name of their publication for potential advertisers, writers and customers who were like, “It’s what again? You spell it how? Capital N?” They spent so much time, in fact, telling people about the name they ran out of time to tell people how to advertise in it or where to pick it up. It folded, of course, in less than a year.
Fast-forward five years, to my third newspaper. The publisher, a greasy little man nobody ever saw except at all-hands meetings, called us all together to announce that our graphics department was getting a new name. What had been just, you know, the place where advertisers and other media clients got their stuff designed was now going to be called Artworld.pss.
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Immersive Journalism and Virtual Reality
As The New York Times brings new attention to VR, immersive journalism could drive not only changes in the media industry, but mainstream adoption of the technology.
For decades, journalists have been trying to figure out how to better connect audiences to serious events that happen far, far away, and build empathy and understanding. Most recently, media organizations are turning to virtual reality as the possible next step toward that goal. The big news as of late has been The New York Times decision to send 1.2 million Google Cardboard units to subscribers via snail mail. Readers could download the NYTVR app, pop their smartphone into Cardboard, and watch several videos, including an 11-minute documentary on Oleg and two other children ousted from their homes by war called The Displaced.
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Signs of Long-Form Readings Online
In recent years, the news media have followed their audience’s lead and gone mobile, working to make their reporting accessible to the roughly seven-in-ten American adults who own a smartphone. With both a smaller screen size and an audience more apt to be dipping in and out of news, many question what kind of news content will prevail. U.S. public show signs of engaging with long-form articles on cellphones.
One particular area of uncertainty has been the fate of long, in-depth news reports that have been a staple of the mainstream print media in its previous forms. These articles – enabled by the substantial space allotted them – allow consumers to engage with complex subjects in more detail and allow journalists to bring in more sources, consider more points of view, add historical context and cover events too complex to tell in limited words.
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NPR visuals team use analytics
How many analytics platforms is your newsroom using? The answer to that question goes back to, or should go back to, what the organisation is trying to measure on the web and how it interprets what every engagement or audience development editor is trying to find a definition for: a story’s impact.
Back in November, NPR received a $35,000 grant from the Knight Foundation to develop an analytics bot that would help the visuals team take better action informed by what they measured about their work, but also rethink their goals and definition of success.
“We’d been playing around with alternative metrics for longer than one and a half years and this idea came out of our questioning of what our mission is, why have a visuals team at a radio organisation?”, said Brian Boyer, editor of NPR’s visuals team.
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New York Times podcast team
Another news organization has decided to invest in podcasts, and this one’s a biggie: The New York Times is creating a new audio team that will work to launch a batch of news and opinion podcasts this year and more in 2017.
To start, the Times will “launch a handful of shows with outside partners which, like Modern Love, have a strong prospect of quickly attracting a wide audience,” Kinsey Wilson, editor for innovation and strategy (and formerly the EVP and chief content officer at NPR), and Sam Dolnick, senior editor, wrote in a memo released Thursday. (The full text is below.) The Times will then “use those shows as a platform from which we can build audience for shows produced within The Times that are as integral to our coverage as our live events and visual journalism efforts.”
“We haven’t settled on themes or particular shows yet,” Wilson told me. “But there’s no shortage of great ideas in the building. In the early going, we will probably favor things that have some shelf life as opposed to news that’s highly perishable, simply because we want to build audience quickly.
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Investigative journalism in Mideast
In the past year, a group of Arab journalists has been working secretly in Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Algeria, and Yemen as part of a global network of investigative reporters mining the so called “Panama Papers.”
They found that some Arab strongmen and their business partners are linked to offshore companies and bank accounts. They also discovered that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his allies have been able to skirt international sanctions by registering shell companies in places like the Seychelles.
What’s astonishing about this story is not that Arab dictators are going offshore to hide their wealth and evade sanctions. It’s that a community of Arab journalists is continuing to do investigative reporting in a region where there is increasingly little tolerance for accountability of any kind.
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The Fate of a Joke in Lebanon
In the spring of 2010, three Lebanese comic-book artists were ordered to come to the Beirut headquarters of the Directorate of General Security, where the country’s censorship authorities are located. Omar Khouri, Hatem Imam, and Fadi (the Fdz) Baki were in their early thirties, and had known one another since they were kids. (I’ve known Khouri and Baki since then as well.) In 2007, they founded Samandal, a trilingual comic magazine based in Beirut, which became an important platform for Middle Eastern comic artists. “When we were first called in, we had no idea what was going on,” Khouri said. “We assumed that there was a problem with our publishing license or some missing paperwork.”
The three were told to sit on a bench and not to speak to one another. Then Imam was ushered into an office.
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Award draws Amanpour comparison
CNN’s Nima Elbagir may not be a household name for most British television viewers, but the Sudanese journalist is making such an impact internationally with her fearless reports from Africa and the Middle East that she is being compared with the network’s veteran Christiane Amanpour, who shot to fame with her Balkans coverage in the 1980s.
Elbagir won an award for specialist reporting from the Royal Television Society and only narrowly missed television journalist of the year.
Her winning coverage was headed by a six-month investigation into people-smuggling from the Nile delta in fishing boats to Rome; undercover reporting of children for sale in Nigeria – she was offered two for $500; and an encounter with a mother and daughter who practise female genital mutilation.
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Investigative journalism’s new outlet
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — The two uniformed jail guards argued angrily, cursed each other, then erupted into a nasty brawl with punches and furniture and bodies flying. As the fight ended and the guards skulked away to lick their wounds, a breathless audience of about 100 people looked on.
The violent eruption wasn’t in a jail. It was on the stage of The Living Room theater in Kansas City, and it was the latest example of an innovative new approach to investigative journalism: put a controversial story on stage and dramatize it for audiences who might not otherwise be aware of the issues at stake and the discoveries made by traditional news media.
The Kansas City production, “Justice in the Embers,” is the latest example of the collaboration called “StoryWorks,” launched by the California-based Center for Investigative Reporting, a non-profit journalistic organization, and the Bay Area’s Tides Theater group. The ways of investigative journalism have changed little since the days of Upton Sinclair and Ida Tarbell — a reporter works and digs and writes a story for months or years, then publishes or broadcasts it and…hopes for the best. Hopes that the public, or the government, is moved or outraged enough to take action. And if not, the story settles quietly into the archives. Though multi-media techniques have improved the presentation of investigative stories, they still reach mostly an audience of dedicated news consumers, and rarely much more.
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50 blogs by journalists, for journalists 2016
This is a list of blogs by journalists, journalism academics and photo-journalists sharing tips and perspectives on topics such as social media, data journalism, apps, tools, and the latest developments in the industry.
The blogs are listed in random order and we have not included any blogs hosted by news organisations or other sites.
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Longform Visual Storytelling Blog
Storybench and Northeastern’s Media Innovation program are proud to announce that we’re launching a new longform visual storytelling site. Today, Ochre passes from its previous owners Blue Chalk Media, a digital media company based in Brooklyn, to the Media Innovation program, a new graduate program in digital journalism at Northeastern University.
Ochre’s first story edited by the Media Innovation program is about The Boat, an interactive graphic novel published by SBS Australia that tells the fictional story of Mai, a 16-year-old girl whose desperate parents decide to send her to Australia by boat to save her from conflict. On Ochre, Media Innovation student Yingchi Wei dissects the digital techniques and aesthetics used to create The Boat.
The Media Innovation program and Storybench editors will oversee the production and editing of stories for Ochre, which is designed as a gathering point for reflecting and highlighting the changes in today’s visual storytelling landscape.
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‘I was terribly wrong’ – writers on Arab spring
Five years ago the Guardian asked me to evaluate the effects of the Tunisian uprising on the rest of the Arab world, and specifically Syria. I recognised the country was “by no means exempt from the pan-Arab crisis of unemployment, low wages and the stifling of civil society”, but nevertheless argued that “in the short to medium term, it seems highly unlikely that the Syrian regime will face a Tunisia-style challenge”.
That was published on 28 January 2011. On the same day a Syrian called Hasan Ali Akleh set himself alight in protest against the Assad regime in imitation of Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation in Tunisia. Akleh’s act went largely unremarked, but on 17 February tradesmen at Hareeqa in Damascus responded to police brutality by gathering in their thousands to chant “The Syrian people won’t be humiliated”. This was unprecedented. Soon afterwards, the Deraa schoolboys were arrested and tortured for writing anti-regime graffiti. When their relatives protested on 18 March, and at least four were killed, the spiralling cycle of funerals, protests and gunfire was unleashed. In 2011, I wrote that Assad personally was popular, and so he remained until his 30 March speech to the ill-named People’s Assembly. Very many had suspended judgment until that moment, expecting an apology for the killings and an announcement of serious reforms. Instead, Assad threatened, indulged in conspiracy theories, and, worse, giggled repeatedly.
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Passing of Leila Alaoui: Celebrating her work
“The Moroccans” is a series of life-sized photographic portraits shot in a mobile studio transported around Morocco. Tapping into my Moroccan heritage, I spent time staying with different communities to create photographs from the perspective of the participant observer, aiming for a more informed angle than an external documentarian might take. Rather than being objective, the series adopts the subjectivity of my own position as both an insider and native Moroccan, and simultaneously an outsider as the critically informed documentarian. This hybrid position echoes the postcolonial correction that globally conscious contemporary artists are now mounting worldwide to counterpoint the tired exoticization of North Africa and the Arab region by Euro-American artists through history.
The photographer Leila Alaoui has died on 18 January 2016 aged 33 of a heart attack after being shot in terrorist attacks in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso.
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HuffPo & Upworthy Downsize
Layoffs hit both media companies as they try to keep up with the evolution of video.
As the world of online and mobile video continues to fragment, the shifting landscape is requiring media companies to be more nimble to keep up. That has led to a series of layoffs and restructurings at several media outlets, including The Huffington Post and Upworthy.
Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington, whose company is owned by AOL (which was itself acquired by Verizon last year), sent out a memo to employees on Friday saying the company is shifting its approach to video.
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Refugees in Germany launch paper
When Ramy Alasheq was searching last year for a title to give to a newspaper he was helping launch for Arabic-speaking refugees in Germany, the inspiration came from his own journey.
A Syrian-Palestinian refugee, journalist, poet and activist who has asylum in the European nation, Alasheq was at the time at his home in Cologne with his host family.
“They are great and friendly, they give me a lot of love,” he told Al Jazeera. “Once, I thanked Cristina, the mother and wife of the family, for everything. She said, ‘Don’t thank me. I just opened the door’.”
The newspaper, he thought, should be called “Abwab”, Arabic for doors.
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Navigating new world of eyewitness media
Of all the major news events over 2015 it’s hard to think of one which didn’t feature footage captured by a member of the public. The age of eyewitness media, where anyone with a smartphone and social media account can take the place of professional camera person, has turned breaking news on its head and news organisations are still figuring out how to deal with this explosion in newsworthy material.
Issues of social news gathering, verification, ethics and hoaxes are causing headaches in newsrooms around the world, so to see out the year we spoke to a range of experts about their opinion on the shifting landscape.
Listen to radio story.
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Journo crowdfunding campaigns
In the past, we’ve called them The Big 3.
They hold the distinction of being, as far as we can discern, the only crowdfunding campaigns to raise more than a million euros in seed money for news startups in the history of journalism.
Editors of the Dutch, German and Spanish news startups spoke within a couple days of each other this spring to talk about what worked and led their campaigns to such a potent reaction.
For obvious reasons, we wrote about each of them. Here are some of the things all three crowdfunding campaigns had in common.
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Carney to revolutionize freelance journalism
Scott Carney wants to completely change freelance journalism and writing, but before we talk about how, let’s look at why he decided to launch a crowdfunding campaign.
It’s not about the money. He doesn’t even think crowdfunding is the best way to raise money for his idea.
“Crowdfunding is not about the money. It’s about the audience, and knowing that the audience is invested in it, to some degree,” he said. “I wanted to have that inbuilt community first so that I know that I have active participants so that going into building it I know it’s going to be a success.”
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Axel Springer Reboots for the Digital Age
BERLIN – When Mathias Döpfner, chief executive of Axel Springer, and a handful of his top managers first set their sights on the United States three years ago, it was with notebooks in hand, rather than checkbooks.
A decade after taking the helm in 2002, Mr. Döpfner had already made significant strides in revamping Germany’s largest print publishing group for the digital age. The combined online audience of its flagship newspapers, Bild and Die Welt, had become one of the largest in Europe, and the group was investing heavily in digital companies, which were generating an increasing share of revenues profits.
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