RGC - How to be a Foreign Correspondent

How To Be A Foreign Correspondent Even If You Don't Have Any Cleft Sticks

[Extract from the RGC Media Seminar]

Reporters who travel through the world's trouble spots spend a lot of their time just trying to survive their own stupidity and ignorance.

It's an honest ineptitude brought on by sudden lusts back at the desk that send the hapless correspondent scurrying from home base to ground zero on a few hours notice.

The result is a jet lagged reporter, clutching the wrong currency, missing a vital visa, arriving in the middle of back-of-beyond without a clue where to sleep that night. And oh yes, under savage desk orders to file an in-depth analysis piece on the latest turn of bizarre events before nightfall.

Here's a Canadian example of honest ineptitude. Last winter in Sarajevo a clutch of American reporters told me with great chortling chuckles about two Canadian reporters who had just earned undying shame for applying to the Serbs for a visa to travel in Croatia. If that wasn't bad enough, it turned out the reporters really wanted to go to Bosnia, but didn't know it.

And then there was the newly arrived and very disoriented New York Daily something or other reporter who asked me in Mogadishu, a city where even the copper telephone wires had been looted out of the ground, if I could direct him to the nearest automatic banking machine.

Any reporter who has worked the nasty corners of the world will tell you that 90 percent of the job is simply looking after logistics; how to get there from here, where to stay, where to find clean water and food, and most important, where and how to file the story. Whatever time is left over, if there is any, can go to working on the story.

The top pros have a technique for dealing with all of this and after assignments and contracts in Ethiopia, Kenyan, Somalia, and the former Yugoslavia I'm now convinced that the reason they are so good is precisely because they know and use this secret. It puzzles me that more reporters don't follow their lead.

The very moment they know they'll be going somewhere odd, or they discover themselves in some vastly complicated conflict, they find out which international aid and relief agencies are on the ground.

Groups such as the International Red Cross, Medecins sans Frontieres, CARE, Lutheran World Federation, and many others, always have people on the ground well before reporters even realize there's is a story going.

Aid workers know far more about what local conditions are like and what's going on than any embassy official or military commander. In fact local diplomats and international military types get most of their information from aid workers.

The different aid and relief agencies also have communications facilities such as satellite phones they're usually willing to lend to a reporter in exchange for nothing more than goodwill.

A reporter stuck for a place to stay, can at the very least, get a recommendation for somewhere decent and quite often an offer of a bed and a meal.

Getting around in any messy conflict is always nearly impossible and hideously expensive. A car and driver in Bosnia last year was running about $US150 a day. If you fly anywhere in a world conflict your backpack better be full of 50 dollar US bills.

But here again the aid and relief agencies can come through big time. It's almost always possible to hitch a ride with a relief worker and while they wouldn't accept the offer of payment for road travel, will always be grateful for something towards the cost of a flight. Yes they'll give receipts.

For Canadian reporters stuck in Canada, trying desperately to climb the ladder to an international assignment, the home offices of the big aid and relief groups can be the ticket to somewhere nasty but newsworthy. Any ambitious domestic reporter aspiring to a foreign assignment can easily build up an impressive portfolio of foreign stories filed domestically simply by talking with Canadian aid groups on a regular basis. There isn't a week that goes by that an outfit such as CARE doesn't have something new and startling to relay from its field workers in any of a hundred countries. Most of the time that stuff never gets reported.

With half a dozen good stories already filed and a good story series proposal worked out with the help of aid agencies a foreign assignment is practically a sure bet.

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