On journalism
Freelance journalism and the Leveson Inquiry
Throughout the Leveson Inquiry, news executives have consistently vilified freelance journalists, who provide a means to assign blame for a paper’s illegal activities without indicting any of its full-time staff. Guest writer Daanish Alam investigates the possible effects of the Leveson Inquiry on freelancers.
Donate to Reporters Instructed in Saving Colleagues (RISC)
Reporters Instructed in Saving Colleagues (RISC) was founded by Sebastian Junger in reaction to the death of his friend and colleague Tim Hetherington, who lost his life covering combat in the Libyan city of Misrata a year and a half ago. RISC trains freelance journalists in battlefield medicine and in April they completed their first […]
Frontline Club phone hacking survey
Frontline Club asked its members in July to share their thoughts on the ongoing phone hacking scandal. The results, detailed below, make for interesting reading. They show that, of those who have responded to the survey so far, there is broad agreement on a range of issues – from opposition to statutory regulation, to the […]
Julian Assange Sydney Peace Prize: full video
Last week at Frontine, WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange was awarded the Sydney Peace Prize gold medal for Peace with Justice. You can read our report of events here. Below you can find the full video of the event. A write up of a Q&A section with Assange, which followed the speeches, can be found here […]
Mr Blair: Was Jesus Wrong? If So, You Must Be Right by Peter Stanford
Illustration by Chris Riddell Tony Blair is busy outing himself as a man of God. Which is immediately ironic after all that time during which Blair refused to “do God” – as his media manager Alastair Campbell informed us. Since leaving Downing Street, Blair has used the G-word with a mixture of the fervour and […]
Looted Britain by Frontline
Public utilities like telecom and gas and essential industries such as British Airways were sold off by the Tories in the closest thing, post-war, to legalised political corruption. What we all owned was taken away from us, flogged off at a cheap price to win votes, and the proceeds used to fund tax cuts. In […]
Pure Kashmir by Muzamil Jaleel
Illustration by Clara Vulliamy While Pakistan has helped the war on terror, it has been reluctant to crack down on militants from the Lashkar-E-Taiba group. Now it is under pressure to do just that – with explosive results. The guard stands lazily at the entrance of a crammed brick bunker. Without saying a word, […]
Who killed Politkovskaya?
The case against those accused of killing Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya outside her Moscow apartment in October 2006 collapsed this Thursday as the jury aquitted all three suspects. One day later the presiding judge, Yevgeni Zubo, ordered the Russian Investigative Committee reopen the case, “The fact that no one at all has been held accountable […]
And then they came for me
Lasantha Wickrematunge, the editor of the Sri Lanka newspaper The Sunday Leader who was murdered on Sunday, wrote his own farewell letter days before he was murdered. I blogged about his brutal murder on 8 January, but I am posting his final editorial in full here, No other profession calls on its practitioners to lay […]
Somalia’s Exiled Press Pack
Speculation continues about the fate of the western journalists kidnapped with their Somali colleagues. As usual with Somalia there are lots of different theories floating around but I learned long ago to steer clear of anyone who claims to know what’s going on. Read more http://tinyurl.com/6xpee3.
Remembering the fallen
The dedication of Jaume Plensa’s giant glass vase ‘Breathing’ on the roof of the BBC at Portland Place as a memorial to all who have fallen in the cause of news and reporting was moving, fitting and strangely remote. It is fitting and timely because reporting is an increasingly dangerous business. The grim numbers of […]
From Forgotten Frontlines
Remember when Nagorno-Karabakh topped the news? Two decades ago it became the war to report. For a while we all knew how to say and even spell the name of the disputed territory fought over by Armenia and Azerbaijan. Armenia eventually took control and many thousands died. Armenian journalist Vardan Hovhannisyan’s film, A Story of […]
When hope turns to fear
You could see it on every face, in every pair of eyes. Here a hesitant smile; there a glint of hope. The weary and the hungry lined the early morning streets of Bulawayo as the elections results started seeping out, you could already smell the scent of change in the air. I had arrived in […]
Rough Justice
A tale of two men in modern, democratic Afghanistan, seven years after ‘liberation’. Both charged with serious crimes, both cases receiving a significant amount of publicity. General Abdul Rashid Dostum, former Northern Alliance commander and warlord with a private army, has been charged over the abduction and abuse of a father and son who ended […]
Africa’s Dark Heart
There are few place names as darkly tantalising as The Congo. It’s not just that the name wears an aura of mystery. It is much more portentous than that. The challenge is to work out why a region in the centre of Africa that does not appear markedly different from other equatorial parts of the […]
Congolese Cliches
Always use the word ‘Africa or ‘Darkness’ or ‘Safari’ in your title. Subtitles may include the words ‘Zanzibar’, ‘Masai’, ‘Zulu’, ‘Zambezi’, ‘Congo’, ‘Nile’, ‘Big’, ‘Sky, ‘Shadow’, ‘Drum’, ‘Sun’ or ‘Bygone’. Also useful are words such as ‘Guerrillas’, ‘Timeless’, ‘Primordial’ and ‘Tribal’. Binyavanga Wainaina, How to Write About Africa (Granta 92) The going rate for a […]
Far from over for FARC
They called him Toucan. His hooked nose and gold-teeth smile were menacing but also comical. His partner was stocky with closely cropped hair, neck and arms emblazoned with tattoos of saints and crucifixes. It seems that stereotypes exist for a reason and the Hollywood image of Colombian drug dealers was made real in this remote […]
Change? What change?
When the editor of The Times, John Delane, decided back in 1854 to send a reporter, William Russell, to the Crimea to cover the war, it was because Delane was fed up with relying on military freelances. The Times had originally engaged Lieutenant Charles Nasmyth, of the Bombay Artillery, to report from the Crimea but […]
The Talib who turned
There was little in the dismal reception room to dispel the all-pervading cold of the snow outside. Mice scurried among the relics of half-eaten food on plates scattered around an unlit wood-burning stove. Apart from a few blankets and a couple of kalashnikovs the space was bare. Perhaps I had expected finer trappings for Musa […]
The new Falklands war
At a great, rumbustious old fashioned Fleet Street leaving do, shortly before Christmas, one of the departing journalists recalled in his farewell speech that he has been looking through his old passports and found he has visited more than a hundred countries. That, however, was before he had fallen out with a new regime at […]
The Revolution Fades
The tangerine sunlight, deepening and sweetening as dusk approaches, strokes the peeling stucco of Havana’s colonial ruins, every doorway teeming with life, every window framing faces and pouring out music. But what everyone knows – every leather-skinned believer in the revolution, every velvet-skinned chica strutting her stuff, every vested old man slapping dominoes onto a […]
Under the Turkish cosh
In their own different ways, Diyarbakir, Hasankeyf and Hakkari are trying to cope with events that have become more than a regional struggle between the Turkish state and its Kurdish minority. The run-down city of Diyarbakir remains the regional hub and political centre of the Kurdish rights movement, where the city’s crumbling infrastructure is testimony […]
Drawing Jihad
“Get that negative energy out on the paper,” urges Awad Alyami waving his arms like an orchestra conductor. The objects of his exhortation – eight convicted jihadi warriors – sit at a long table clutching pastel crayons, as intent as children in a kindergarten. Each of these young men has served prison time for terror-related […]
A painful birth
Eight years after the war finished, Kosovo wears its poverty on its sleeve. The capital Pristina is an eye-sore. The place is strewn with refuse. Its streets are clogged with rubble and double-parked cars. UN has done nothing to invigorate its stagnant economy. The spirit of the place, however, could not be more different. There […]
Pakistan Teeters
“We’re watching a lot of cookery programmes and cricket!” cried one of my oldest Pakistani friends when I arrived at her house a week after General Pervez Musharraf’s declaration of emergency rule. All Pakistan’s private news channels were taken off air on Saturday November 3rd when the general announced his second coup. Yet fuzzy TV […]
Working the warzones
The Frontline Club may have been away from home territory when it ventured to New York last month, but the spirit of debate that has come to characterise its London events made the trans-Atlantic trip admirably. About 200 people gathered at Brooklyn’s Powerhouse Arena on Nov 13 for a vigorous debate on the theme: Is […]
Balkans smouldering again
The Balkans are back in the news again – Kosovo is set to declare independence, Serbian paramilitaries are threatening to ‘protect’ the province, in Bosnia people are said to be stockpiling food in fear of a resurgence of violence. I recently went to Serbia soon after a fairly prolonged trip to Iraq and Afghanistan and […]
Hillary’s Comeback
It would make a great film, but it makes an even better story: the wife of a former president, humiliated by his philandering and lies in office, is poised to succeed him, and in the process become the first female head of state in the world’s sole superpower. The resurrection of Hillary Clinton from embattled […]
The End of Democracy
A decade ago Russia was on its knees. Today it is an energy giant in a world with an apparently unslakeable thirst for oil. As its wealth grows, so does Moscow’s desire to re-establish itself on the world stage. Overtures to Hamas, nuclear co-operation with Iran, and a sharing of Serbia’s concerns over Kosovo are […]
Killing Foretold
At the time of writing the State Peace and Development Council, as Burma’s junta styles itself, was still sticking to its story that only 10 had died as a result of its latest assault on democracy in September. Other sources suggested a far higher figure, running into the hundreds. Whatever the actual tally, these were […]