Reuters Editors

Reuters style on the conflict in Iraq

Earlier on Tuesday, the following note was sent to staff throughout Reuters. I thought readers might also be interested in our style on so important an issue.    “Last week, a decision by the American TV network NBC to begin calling the conflict in Iraq a civil war led to a lively debate over the language the media should use in its reporting on Iraq. At Reuters, the political and general news editors have again reviewed our style. We ask all journalists to avoid using labels and instead describe what is happening in Iraq accurately, fairly and dispassionately. Civil war may be used when it is attributed to a named source but should not be used without such attribution. In general, bureaus should take their cue from the language used in stories from Iraq.   Whether or not what is happening in Iraq is civil war is in dispute — among supporters and opponents of U.S. policy in Iraq, among academics and within the general public. Some argue that the conflict in Iraq is not yet a civil war, others that it has already gone beyond civil war. It is a complex conflict, with elements of an insurgency, terrorism, sectarian conflict, intra-confessional fighting, banditry and warlordism. We will not assist readers in their understanding of what is happening by resorting to easy labels or by decreeing that specific boilerplate background needs to be included in every story.   The term civil war has also become an emotive phrase and a highly charged political issue in the context of Iraq. Reuters policy has long been to avoid using contentious labels and to take special care in the interests of objectivity in the case of words with emotional significance. It is also our policy not to take sides in any conflict or dispute. We should be mindful of these principles when writing about Iraq and describing events there. The use of language in our reporting about Iraq will remain under review and will be subject to change as the situation changes. Your comments are welcome.”   Paul Holmes is the Political & General News Editor at Reuters

If Youre There When News Happens

Who can forget the deadly tsunami of December 2004, the London bombings of July 2005, the fury and aftermath of Hurricane Katrina on the U.S. Gulf Coast in August and September, 2005?

In all those events, some of the most compelling images were taken by amateur photographers and videographers. The same can be said for some events this year, including the arrest outside a New York nightclub of Curtis Jackson, better known in the rap world as 50 Cent, and the crash of a small plane piloted by New York Yankees pitcher Cory Lidle into a Manhattan apartment building.

Now Reuters and Yahoo are announcing a strategic alliance to solicit user-generated news photos and videos, publish them on Reuters.com and syndicate them to Reuters media outlets worldwide. Were starting this week with photos and will add videos later. Heres how it will work: If you see a news event, simply send the picture to You Witness, either by emailing it to pics@reuters.com or visiting the You Witness site at www.reuters.com/youwitness. Reuters editors will review the pictures and select the most newsworthy images for publication on Reuters.com. The very highest quality pictures may be purchased by Reuters and distributed on our professional wire.

Our worldwide professional staff and regular stringer photographers will remain at the center of our pictures service. Their talent and their special eye is crucial for a high-quality picture operation. But non-professionals bring their unique point of view and angle, enhancing and adding diversity to our content. In a sense, all the world are potential stringers.

So as youre thinking about taking news photographs, think about what constitutes a good picture.

Most importantly, it will be of interest to a wide audience. It may depict an event in the news: a train crash, a clash in the streets, deliriously happy fans the moment the big game is won.

Or it may not be of a strictly ‘news’ event. It could be an out-of-the-ordinary moment in time in an otherwise ordinary day. Something that has novelty and impact. For example, a model falling over her huge heels on the catwalk, or a fox running up Downing Street, or a fire station catching fire, or a mouse hitching a lift on the back of a toad during a flood.

Return to Kabul: from wood burning stoves to wi-fi

I have been visiting the Kabul bureau this week and reflecting on how things have changed since I reported from Kabul in the heady days after the flight of the Taliban in November, 2001.

The Reuters office is a house in a relatively upscale neighborhood of Kabul with bedrooms where foreign journalists sleep during their stay. When I first stepped through the front gates of the compound five years ago I entered a world of controlled chaos.

All of us, writers and photographers, worked, ate and socialized in a single room on the second floor. It was cramped, thick with smoke from all the cigarettes and stuffy from the wood burning stove that jutted into the room. Evenings were spent under curfew in the same room, often huddled around a laptop watching a DVD. The best we could get on the television was a snowy image of Afghan TV. The sound would fade in and out, often during news broadcasts.

The food was, to say the least, basic. Please get them to stop serving us cauliflower all the time. Were fed up with it, one of my colleagues pleaded when I arrived to help bring some order to an operation that had exploded almost overnight from a single correspondent under the Taliban to about a dozen journalists. The only way to file photographs and news stories was over satellite phone. I later learned that one of the monthly phone bills hit $150,000.

The house is still the same, the faces familiar. But five years have brought a world of difference to working conditions. Gas heaters have replaced the wood burning stoves and the office has moved down a floor into three rooms. The house even has wi-fi. Sat phones still come in useful on reporting trips outside Kabul but the days of mega phone bills have gone. So has the cauliflower. The old cook is still here but he now works as the gatekeeper. We have a new cook who makes superb potato chips. But were still using generators for most of our electrical power a sign of how little basic infrastructure in Kabul has developed since 2001.

The familiar faces mean continuity in the newsroom, now run by Chief Correspondent Terry Friel, an Australian who moved here from New Delhi in August. its good to see that Afghan journalists are taking leadership roles. I wanted to say a little about two of them — Ahmad Masood and Sayed Salahuddin.

Many fine journalists are accidents of history; individuals who turn to this craft unexpectedly when tumultuous events upset their hopes and dreams. Journalism is not something you need a diploma for, unlike the law, accountancy or medicine. The best way to learn is on the job, from people who know how to do it. Many try and fail. A fair few succeed and Ahmad Masood is one of them.

Bringing the blogs to Reuters.com users

We’re planning to extend the subjects covered by our related blogs feature and to extend the number of blogs from Reuters staff. I’m eager to hear your views on both this new feature and any other ideas on the kind of blogging you’d like to see on Reuters.com. Dean Wright is managing editor for consumer services at Reuters

Citizen journalists go to the polls

The finely balanced mid-terms have encouraged a wave of citizen journalism projects that are nicely summarized in a newassignment.net posting (full disclosure: Reuters is a newassignment sponsor).

Among the more eye-catching are: Video the Vote, a project to record evidence of problems outside polling stations, Congresspedia providing user-generated profiles of the challengers most likely to make it, and the Polling Place Photo Project capturing images of election day.

And as mainstream media continues to delve deeper into citizen journalism, CNN’s i-reports and the BBC among others are looking to enrich their traditional coverage with voters’ stories and images.

Dean Wright is the managing editor for consumer services at Reuters.

Is news coverage a lottery?

The UNs Jan Egeland bemoaned much world coverage of disasters as a lottery in a keynote speech at the 2006 Newsxchange conference in Turkey last week.

Some disasters get a lot of headlines; others get little attention. Sometimes its easy to guess why one story or another grabbed world attention; other times it is much harder to understand. Reuters AlertNet, the humanitarian news portal run by Reuters Foundation, has a World Press Tracker that follows how a sampling of the worlds press covers disasters and emergencies.

The Tsunami disaster of 2004 grabbed the headlines as it occurred suddenly and shockingly just after Christmas; it affected areas where many tourists had still and video cameras to record the destruction; it hit places well-known as tourist spots.

Emergencies that grind on rather than occurring in an instant or those that happen in areas off the well-travelled news routes have a much harder time making it onto front pages or into top-ten lists.

Thankfully, The Long Tail is a phenomenon that has applicability in news as well there are many places on the web where you can find detailed information about many of the lesser-known, but heart-rending and important disasters. One place to start is this index providing facts and news about many world crises.

So maybe Jan Egeland is half right it is a bit of a lottery to get on the front pages or into the top-10 lists of news stories. But in fact there is a lot of information out there; you just have to look. And you have to be interested.

Like so much in news, coverage of emergencies is both push and pull. News organizations can push the stories we think are important and interesting. But what is really important is for the audience to reach out and read what is important and interesting to it.

Working for Reuters as an Iraqi in Baghdad – The Editor responds

I am now into my final few days visiting our news operation in Baghdad and wanted to answer readers questions before I leave. Ive grouped my responses into topics. Weve translated the reader feedback into Arabic for those Iraqi colleagues whose English is basic. They will be heartened by the many expressions of support for their work.

JOURNALIST SAFETY

Q. 11 handicap wanted to know what it takes to ensure physical and emotional wellbeing in a war zone like Iraq. k.taylor asked how the families of our Iraqi journalists cope with the constant worry of whether they are safe.

A. News organizations like Reuters have taken security increasingly seriously in the past decade or so as reporting has become more dangerous. We train our journalists how to behave in hostile environments, using professional instructors who are usually former soldiers or policemen. Our foreign security advisers fulfill that role in Baghdad. You can never be entirely safe in a war zone. It goes with the territory. But we can take steps to mitigate the risks. Flak jackets and helmets are one way and in many places we use armored cars without press markings (which would make you a target of kidnappers here). In Iraq, other than in an embed with U.S. forces, body armor can also increase the risk because it makes you stand out. Keeping a low profile, limiting the amount of time you spend in one place, not getting too close to danger and knowing when to turn back are all ways to reduce risk. We constantly tell our staff that no story is worth a life but, tragically, four Reuters journalists have been killed in Iraq. Journalists used to be quite macho about covering wars, pretending they could take anything. We now know that is nonsense. Our managers are trained to recognize signs of traumatic stress and we encourage our journalists to talk about what they have witnessed whether to a colleague or a manager. Relaxation also helps. Our compound has a small gym so people can exercise, which is another aid to coping with stress. Its important as well to get time off. You can burn out covering wars and the emotional toll creeps up on you. Some trauma is normal when you are under great stress and seeing awful things. Its a coping mechanism. If the strains become too great, our journalists can speak confidentially to trained trauma counselors. The stress is far greater when you are covering a conflict in your own country than in someone elses. There is an emotional attachment and you have to worry about family and friends as well as your own safety. Most of our Iraqi staff live in Baghdad and travel to work each day, making sure they leave for home well before the 9 p.m. curfew. So they do see their families most days and cell phone service is pretty good. If youre interested in learning more about the emotional aspects of journalism, The Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma is a very good resource. The Committee to Protect Journalists has details on all the journalists killed in Iraq since March 2003 most of them Iraqis.

LIFE IN THE REUTERS COMPOUND

Q. Paul DeMartino wondered whether there were any non-journalists at our compound and how much security is provided by some external agency. Mike Arkus says I should put my money where my mouth is and hopes we pay all staff, regardless of nationality, an equal salary.

We have quite a large support staff. There are two cooks and a couple of office managers as well as drivers, technicians, cleaners and maintenance workers. We also have two huge, diesel-run generators in the garden. More than three years after the U.S.-led invasion, the public power supply is still intermittent in Baghdad and the generators kick in a lot. Our foreign security advisers come from a British-based company, one of several such companies whose services the media and other organizations retain to help them operate in danger zones. We also use a private Iraqi security company to provide armed guards at the checkpoints on our street and in our compound and living quarters. We dont have any security provided by the U.S. or British military. All we ask is that the military treat journalists like civilians and respect their right to gather news.

Working for Reuters as an Iraqi in Baghdad

Reuters, like the few other foreign news organizations still present in Baghdad, could not operate without Iraqi journalists to report, film and photograph life and death on the streets of Iraq. So I came to Baghdad to meet them and see how our operation works.

Our compound, protected by blast walls, razor wire, searchlights, armed Iraqi guards and British security advisers, is on the east bank of the Tigris across the river from the fortified Green Zone. Its the workplace for about 40 journalists. Only seven of them are non-Iraqis our British bureau chief, four correspondents who are Basque, British, Lebanese and South African, a Filipino chief photographer and a television producer who is Jordanian.

We have Iraqi Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds in our newsroom and all are aware of the Reuters reputation for fairness and accuracy and how they must help maintain it. Like Reuters journalists anywhere in the world, they leave their politics, ethnic roots and religion at home.

Several of our staff have been with Reuters since before the 2003 invasion when working for a foreign news agency meant the risk of falling foul of Saddam Husseins security men. Others joined us after the invasion. As in so many places where conflict convulses a country, some of our more recent colleagues are accidents of history who have switched to journalism when their world was turned upside down.

One of our reporters, a man with excellent English, is a lawyer. Another colleague is a bookseller who monitors Iraqi TV networks for news Reuters reporters can then check independently. Others used to be commercial photographers or videographers. Until three years ago they filmed weddings. Now they chronicle the carnage of everyday Iraq.

We train all our staff, regardless of nationality, both inside and outside Iraq. They all understand the Reuters principles of independence, integrity and freedom from bias. A team spirit means that, as they did on Saturday evening, they can sit and talk together while sharing a smoke from a hookah pipe without regarding each other as rivals across the deadly sectarian and ethnic divides that prevail in the world outside the compound.

All of them have tales of personal tragedy to tell — stories of the killings of loved ones and other sufferings that have afflicted Iraq since 2003. Im not going to name them because so many Iraqi journalists fear that divulging their identity amounts to a death sentence at the hands of insurgents or militias. As I am writing this on Sunday, an Iraqi woman who presents a sports show on Iraqi state television has just been found killed with her driver in their car.

Being there

This weekend I participated in (another) debate about citizen journalism at the Battle of Ideas in London.

With journalism in something of a state of self-doubt (lack of trust from parts of the audience, future of newspapers in doubt, questions over the business model), it seems that a debate about the future interactions of professional journalists with citizen journalists is a feature of conferences everywhere.

In some ways, nothing has changed; in some ways, everything has changed.

In the early 1990s, when I was Reuters bureau chief in China and there was rioting and unrest in Tibet, I couldnt go. None of the reporters in my bureau could go we simply werent allowed in. So how did we report? We endlessly called the various guest hostels in Lhasa and interviewed travellers about what they had seen and experienced, and that became the basis for our articles.

Citizen journalists were on the scene and their reports were vivid and important. So has nothing changed?

Today, in a similar situation, those citizen journalists wouldnt have to talk with me to get their stories out. They could post their words on a blog, they could post pictures on flickr or their home video on youtube. So has everything changed?

The question for me is what role and what value the mediation I provided played.

It’s all about the conversation

Weve had reporters blogs on Reuters.com for some time; now we want to expand the concept to have regular musings from me and some of our other senior editors on the site.

The reason is simple: we want to encourage much more conversation between those of us who are writing, editing and planning Reuters global news coverage and those of you who are reading and using it.

We want you to understand more about who we are and what we think; we want to know more about whats on your mind.

Journalism today is about enabling and participating in a conversation. It no longer can be just a hierarchical transfer of information. What I as an editor think may be interesting and important; what will make us successful is if that intersects with what is attractive to YOU.

To make journalism relevant for the 21st century we must make sure we experiment boldly with different forms of writing and ways of interacting with our audience while never being cavalier about the importance of journalistic standards and processes. We must marry the intelligence of journalists with the wisdom of the crowds.

I think there will always be a future for journalism that disciplined search for facts and the weaving of a coherent narrative that helps people understand their world. The big question is whether there will be a future for journals, those institutions that until now have hired and paid people in my profession.

Will the best and most successful journalists be the free agents?