The ice-cream kidnap code
Surprising secrets from Australia’s best foreign correspondents
Foreign correspondence: A glamourous-sounding job that evokes war zones, shoddy working conditions, danger, and the tyranny of distance.
You might think that a sophisticated kit of complex communication devices, body armour and an encyclopedic knowledge of the country you’re covering would be essential in this trade.
In fact, simple common sense is the most important tool a foreign correspondent can possess, according to Aaron Glantz, senior reporter for the U.S. nonprofit investigative centre Reveal. He arrived in Iraq after the fall of Baghdad, and eventually wrote a book, How America Lost Iraq.
For that reason, Glantz said, not everyone is cut out to be a foreign correspondent.
He spoke as part of a panel discussion of current and former foreign correspondents at Storyology in Brisbane. And his co-panellists agreed: Al Jazeera’s Liz Gooch, who covers Malaysia; the ABC’s Mark Willacy, who wrote a book on the Fukushima disaster; and Andrew Quilty, the Afghanistan-based freelance photographer.
But Glantz also had a point to make about another vital element in most foreign correspondents’ success: The Fixer.
“[The fixer] is the person you’re working with that knows the community you’re reporting in,” he said. “Sometimes they’re a journalist, sometimes someone you know — it’s a collaboration.”
But journalists need to remember that their responsibility to their fixers goes beyond a financial relationship.
“We invariably get to go home. And for the fixers we work with, that is their home,” Glantz said. “They are there for the long haul and they’re taking, in some cases, extreme risk.”
But extreme risk can’t always be avoided, Gooch said. She urged the importance of hostile environment training, and the use of code words with a fixer or companion.
For example, “going for vanilla ice-cream’ means I have been kidnapped — or he is armed.”
Aside from personal danger, Gooch said one of her great challenges is how to interest an audience that doesn’t think much about Malaysia.
“How to tell the story, miles away in a country they will probably never go to,” she said.
You need to tell people stories that haven’t been told before, she said. That includes bringing light to stories people don’t want told — such as babies being auctioned off on Facebook for money in Malaysia.
“The lighter the skin, the more money,” she said. And boys are more expensive.
Quilty said it’s expensive to start up, so it’s important to establish yourself from the beginning.
“I gave myself six months to generate stories of my own,” he said.
