Reporting on the refugee crisis
With each capsized boat and grim picture of beached bloated corpses that appeared in the summer of 2015, more journalists flocked to the shores of the Mediterranean to cover the refugee crisis. As refugees scrambled to cross borders before the doors to Europe began slamming in their faces, many journalists followed alongside, documenting the journeys of thousands of people as they crossed from Syria, Afghanistan, Eritrea or beyond to try and reach “fortress Europe.”
“The first time I went to Lesbos in the summer of 2015, I spoke with a Syrian guy on the beach who had just washed up on shore from the Aegean Sea on an inflatable ‘death boat’. In Damascus he owned an injection mould firm which was obliterated in an airstrike. As we said farewell he handed me a business card, as if we were in a conference,” says Andrew Connelly. “A souvenir from a past life, an emblem of his utility, a force of habit, proof to those that may doubt him and a reminder that these people had normal lives that vanished overnight but with the right mechanisms can be an asset to Europe.”
Connelly spent the latter half of 2015 following the journey of thousands from the shores of Lesbos in Greece, through Hungary and central Europe and up towards Germany and France. Covering this trajectory is a logistical challenge for any journalist, but for freelancers the obstacles can multiply. Yet some, like Connelly, have managed to make this mobile balancing act part of their careers. Connelly has written for POLITICO, Vice, the Independent, Al Jazeera English and works regularly with Radio France International’s English Service and RTE, Ireland’s national radio broadcaster. He is also a founding member of the Matchbox Media Collective, a multimedia group who aim to provide new ways of storytelling.
The Summer of 2015 saw Connelly juggling live broadcasts on Channel 4 with print pieces about refugees protesting as the borders of Eastern Europe were summarily resurrected in a haze of barbed wire and tear gas. “Staff do whatever needs doing, freelancing necessitates carving out a niche,” he says, “so I have focused solely on migration for the best part of a year, which means that outlets gradually identify you with that topic and can help generate work. In general, the financial pressures just put you on the road constantly, juggle cross-media and be always on the hustle.”
“During Summer 2015 there were numerous locations along the refugee trail and there were a series of ‘spectacles’ (boat crossings, columns of people roaming through fields, rioting at barbed wire). Being freelance I could choose to ping pong up and down and report on whatever I deemed necessary at the time, and being solo without almost any kit, I could make these decisions very fast,” says Connelly. “Now borders have solidified, those scenes are gone and in any case audiences have become punch drunk and desensitised to the ‘refugees in desperate journeys/stranded somewhere’ line. Hence editors are seeking practical stories, of interesting initiatives to support asylum seekers, EU refugee policy and how the issue has become a political football and bargaining chip which is tearing the continent apart.”
But financial pressures can have a huge influence on freelancers’ choices around coverage. The decision about whether to spend an extra night in a hotel or whether there might be a couch to crash on in the next destination can be the difference between following a story or letting it go. Connelly believes that even more so than grants, outlets need to first and foremost provide expenses in order to improve the situation for freelancers’ covering this issue.
“If you are breaking even on a story then it starts to feel like a hobby, rather than what it is — a job,” he says. “It’s not being a primadonna to expect modest help with a hotel bill or a car rental that can facilitate and hasten an original piece of reporting. Slumming it overnight at train stations, cadging lifts, befriending a kind volunteer to translate an interview is all part of the gig but romantic as it may sound, logistically it can be a monumental pain in the ass. When you are wasting time scrabbling around for the dirt cheap option, the story suffers, all because an outlet refuses to value your professionalism enough to cough up some petty cash. This kind of upstairs-downstairs attitude to staff vs. freelancers can increase resentment in the ranks.”
Protecting freelancers covering the refugee trail is about more than money, although that’s certainly a good place to start. But it can be easy for editors to presume that because such a beat isn’t necessarily frontline conflict, journalists covering it don’t require extra considerations about their psychological wellbeing or even security, although the scenes they witness and the stories they hear may be extremely traumatic. There are also increased risks to freelancers covering this beat operating from countries such as Turkey, whose increasing restrictions on the press are sharper among those with challenges to getting press accreditation.
Connelly, like many, fears that the focus of the news cycle might have moved on since last summer, despite the numbers of people reaching the shores of Europe likely to be higher this year than the last. The International Organisation for Migration reported at the beginning of April that at least 170,000 have crossed into Europe by sea since the start of 2016, eight times higher than the same number in 2015. Earlier this week, at least 700 people drowned off the coast of Italy in three separate shipwrecks.
The challenge for freelancers and staff journalists alike is how to cover this latest wave of the crisis: “how to convey to audiences that the problem still exists, and to present the issue in a pragmatic way,” says Connelly. “There is a real risk of saturation. In general people have a limit of sympathy, if at all, and when that is used up they have to be shown the potential benefits of migration, and the inevitability of it. Human movement is under attack, not only in relation to asylum seekers, but for European citizens and we ignore that at our peril so there are ways to link the continuing refugee saga with the changing nature of European politics to shift the narrative.”
Article by: Ruth Michaelson, FFR board member and freelance journalist based in Cairo.
You can follow Andrew on twitter here: https://twitter.com/connellyandrew
And read some of his reporting on the refugee crisis here:
http://www.politico.eu/article/bulgaria-threat-to-refugees-migrants-human-rights-dangerous/
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/04/refugee-riot-breaks-greek-island-160427122056272.html
http://mashable.com/2015/08/22/refugees-macedonia-greece-border/http://www.irinnews.org/report/102369/failed-eu-relocation-plan-leaves-refugees-limbo
INSI have published a report on the emotional toll of covering the refugee crisis: http://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/jun/12/refugee-crisis-news-organisations
