Left to right: Joel Brand, Marcus Mabry and David Rohde.
By Trish Anderton
In tones ranging from defiance to joy and mourning to optimism, foreign correspondents gathered Thursday to celebrate the vitality of their profession.
“It’s time for us to take our story back from the handwringers,” Dean Baquet, executive editor of The New York Times, proclaimed in his keynote address at the Overseas Press Club Annual Awards Dinner. “We need to scream about the fact that there is huge and ambitious work being done in the old places like The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post, and in the new places like BuzzFeed and Vice.”
The same digital technologies that have turned the industry’s business model upside down have also given it new tools and “enormous new audiences,” Baquet added.
“The issues confronting the world are big, and our ambitions should be at least as big,” he urged.
There was no shortage of ambitious reporting on display, from C.J. Chivers’ investigation into American troops’ exposure to chemical weapons in Iraq, to Jason Motlagh and Atish Saha’s dissection of a factory collapse in Bangladesh. While heavy hitters like The New York Times were well represented, less traditional organizations like Human Rights Watch, Medium/Matter and HBO Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel also turned up on the winners’ list.
Motlagh started his reportage several months after the Rana Plaza disaster, which claimed more than 1,100 lives. He said he drew inspiration from Saha’s unsparing photos.
“He had worked the scene of the tragedy for three weeks, every day, day in and day out, pouring everything into his photographs,” Motlagh recalled with Saha at his side. “They were startling and personal and they really challenged me to find the words to match.”
Chivers described the secrecy and oppression he faced trying to discover how many U.S. soldiers had been poisoned by abandoned Iraqi chemical weapons.
“Merely mentioning the name, the title of certain chemical weapons records that we were seeking, led one colonel to be taken out of his office and have his computer zapped,” he recalled.
“We like to think it’s Uzbekistan that acts like that, but you’re in a country that does too.”
Secrecy and danger were undercurrents running through the evening. Whitman Bassow Award winner Nick Miroff recalled being surrounded by angry gold miners in Peru, and facing drilling crews in Bolivia who wanted to take his photographer’s camera. He also devoted part of his speech to the plight of fellow Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian, who is imprisoned in Iran.
“Jason is in jail for doing his job, the job that all of us do every day,” said Miroff. Acknowledging Post editors in attendance who’ve been working for Rezaian’s release, he asked the crowd to “show them your support and help us free Jason.”
He got a passionate round of applause in response.
Associated Press journalist Kathy Gannon lit the traditional Candle of Concern in honor of foreign correspondents killed, injured or missing last year. Gannon was gravely injured in a shooting in Afghanistan in 2014. Her colleague Anja Niedringhaus was killed.
“I am so honored to have been asked to light this candle,” Gannon said. “I do it for my friend Anja, and for all of those who are no longer with us. I do it as a symbol of how bright your collective legacies shine, and for those of us whose injuries I hope will inspire us to keep working and refuse to even entertain the word defeat.”
Several trends in the industry have combined to make life increasingly hazardous for journalists in the field. Technology has made it easier than ever for freelancers to operate as one-person crews. Budget cuts have led even the largest media organizations to rely more on those freelancers. And organizations like Islamic State, also known as ISIS, are targeting
journalists in kidnappings and killings.
The memory of OPC member James Foley permeated the evening. Foley was abducted in Syria in 2012 while working as a freelancer, and executed by Islamic State in August 2014. Foley’s parents lit the Candle of Concern in 2013 and attended the dinner this year as well.
Veteran journalist David Rohde of Thomson Reuters received the President’s Award in part for his efforts to address these threats facing freelancers abroad.
Working with the Overseas Press Club, Rohde has led the effort to develop a code of conduct for organizations and freelancers embarking on overseas contracts.
“Never has it been so dangerous, or so expensive – to be blunt – to cover conflict,” Rohde told the audience. “At the same time, many news organizations are struggling with shrinking budgets. We as an industry must work together.”
The code calls on news organizations to show the same concern for freelancers’ welfare as for that of staffers. It says the organizations should factor in the additional cost of training, safety equipment and insurance required for war zones, and pay for stories and expenses promptly.
It says freelancers should have first-aid and hostile-environment training and carry sufficient insurance when operating in war zones. It calls on them to evaluate the dangers of every assignment and “measure the journalistic value of an assignment against the risks.”
Some 60 organizations have signed on to the principles, including AFP, the AP, Bloomberg, the BBC and Reuters. Every major journalism group has endorsed it as well. Rohde says even where the document hasn’t won an endorsement, it has sparked valuable discussions.
“Our goal is not to force news organizations to sign on to some outsider’s guidelines. Our goal is to force conversations inside news organizations,” he explained.
“Together we can stop governments from stealing our voices. Together we can stop the rich, the corrupt and the criminal from intimidating us. Together, we can stop censors from squelching our stories. Together, we will do the reporting we must. Together, we will meet the challenge of our times, and together we will not be silenced.”
Another highlight of the evening was a presentation by cartoonist Signe Wilkinson, who provided a little comic relief. The fourth-time Thomas Nast Award winner tackled the ongoing controversy over religious cartoons with arch humor, noting that many American newspapers “have made themselves safe from a Charlie Hebdo attack by cleverly getting rid of their cartoonists.”
She went on to share a cartoon she’d drawn in 2006 showing the Prophet Mohammed, the Buddha, Jesus Christ and other icons of major faiths laughing over “The Big Fat Book of Offensive Religious Cartoons.” She said the drawing “has gone around the world many times with no complaints” – because, she theorized, it depicted Mohammed in a happy context rather than an angry or
humiliating one.
She added some advice for all religions: “If you don’t want your prophet to appear in a nasty cartoon, don’t do nasty things in the name of your prophet.”
A lively crowd of 453 winners and guests turned out – one of the largest-ever attendances for the annual event. They traveled from as far as Bangladesh, Paris and Oslo to be there.
Deborah Amos, veteran international correspondent for NPR,deftly hosted the proceedings. “It’s so nice to meet my Twitter feed in person,” she laughed, looking out over the crowd.
Marcus Mabry, OPC President, joked that the evening was about much more than the rare sight of “international photojournalists in tuxedos.” Instead, it’s a moment to pause and acknowledge the extraordinary work being done—and the extraordinary people doing it.
“There are few things more humbling than being president of the OPC,” he said in his opening remarks. “To be president of such a club is to be eternally in awe, for our members are the people who brave risks, often mortal, from mortars to disease, to merely report the world to the world.
“It is that simple, and that complicated.”