22 NEWS FOCUS Journalists at Risk
DISARMINGLY DANGEROUS Jonathan Young agrees. He has 20 years of credits with the world’s best-known broadcasters and presenters, and is a member of BAFTA, with nominations and awards from the Royal Television Society and The Guild of Television Camera Professionals. He mentions one danger that will be familiar to any pro YouTuber: the simple pressure to produce material. “When I was a news cameraman working in Sarajevo, Bosnia, everyone starts pointing the finger at you. When everyone else has decided to hunker down, but they still want 40 seconds of pictures.” Getting into these dangerous situations, Young says, can be disarmingly easy. “The war in Libya was easy to get to. You could jump on a trawler, pay a fisherman and land in Benghazi. There were a number of people who were killed.”
YOU CAN’T REALLY DETER PEOPLE FROM TRYING TO ADVANCE THEIR CAREER, BUT IF IT’S JUST FOR A SOCIALMEDIA BOOST, THAT’SNOTAGOODENOUGHREASON
One example came from the conflict in Syria: “A young boy, a teenager, picked up a camera and somehow managed to get in touch with a major news agency. He was a local Syrian and the agency started buying his pictures and making good money from them. Eventually, the news agency gave him some training over the phone and by email, but he was killed in an air strike.” It’s not clear whether the boy’s death was work
related, but the political fallout, Young says, was significant. “The news agency took a lot of flak for the fact its pictures from that location were coming from a teenage boy they’d hired.” GATHERING STORIES SAFELY Anyone tempted to think the world of online media might get an easier ride is sadly mistaken. Henry Langston is a senior field reporter at The Huffington Post , with experience at Vice News during the genesis of high-level online factual content. “ Vice decided it was going to start its own news channel,” he says. “My focus was conflict, so Vice asked if I wanted to start hosting documentaries. “I’m positive there are organisations out there that are pushing the responsibility onto freelancers. That’s a fairly common experience. There are obviously huge risks involved, as well as huge costs. For those to be worth it, you’ve got to be sure you’ve got a media organisation that’s willing to back you up, pay for the work you’re going to produce, provide some assistance in terms of safety and vouch for you if you’re under some threat of arrest. If organisations are going to work with freelancers, they must take responsibility for their safety.” SOMEONE TO CALL The idea of making a living this way is far from new. Vice News was built on the online foundations of the related print magazine and is used to dealing with exactly these safety concerns. Sharbil Nammour, the company’s global head of security, says: “Having lived in some of these countries, I can see why a nice salary coming from a western country would be very attractive to those individuals, but we’re lucky in a sense, because we don’t necessarily have the same set-up as a more traditional news organisation.” Simply put, Vice rarely accepts unsolicited external contributions. “It’s
FACT AND FURIOUS With 20 years of experience, Jonathan Young is used to capturing footage in conflict zones. One danger is the simple pressure of producing material, he says
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