If you are a journalist planning to go to Ukraine to cover the threatening escalation of the war, you might need to work with local producers, fixers, or translators. Here are a few research-based tips for avoiding unintended harm to your local collaborators and yourself and making your reporting more ethical and transparent. These tips …
Are you a journalist going to Ukraine? Don’t be a jerk Read More »
The review of Syed Irfan Ashraf’sThe Dark Side of News Fixing: The Culture and Political Economy of Global Media in Pakistan and Afghanistan (London: Anthem Press, 2022, 240 pp., ISBN ISBN:9781839981371) was originally published in Mass Communication and Society. This version is the Accepted Manuscript. The work of fixers, local media professionals often hired to …
Global conflicts are increasingly documented and covered by people outside of the journalistic mainstream: locally hired media professionals, remote open-source investigators, local eyewitnesses, activists, and data publics. Together, they create complex and heterogeneous ecosystems. These groups have diverse goals, kinds of proximity to the war, and work with varying sets of values and fact-finding procedures. …
The Fixers & Stringers research project – focused on the collaboration among journalists, media organizations, fixers, producers, and stringers – got to its second half and finally has brought some tangible results! I am happy to share these with you in this newsletter, as well as an invitation to a free workshop. What you will …
By Johana Kotišová, available here. This paper investigates the epistemic injustice in conflict reporting, where foreign parachute reporters collaborate with local producers and ‘fixers.’ Drawing from existing research on ‘fixers’ and other media professionals covering conflict zones and the philosophy of emotion and knowledge, I address the following questions: What is the role of local …
By Oleksiy Pluzhnyk The truth of the matter is, of course, that we have a certain amount of information about famine conditions in the south of Russia [Ukraine] … We do not want to make it public, however, because the Soviet Government would resent it and our relations with them would be prejudiced… British Foreign …
The Dictionary of Fear and Hope: The origin of wartime language in Ukrainian media Read More »
By Natalie Gryvnyak I had never thought of becoming a war journalist or a war producer. Yet, in the last nine years, I have become a person that has experienced direct shootings and killings of people on Institutskaya street during Maidan. I saw “little green men” and the military in Crimea during the “referendum” and …
Ukrainian journalists’ new role: collecting evidence of war crimes Read More »
By Johana Kotišová and Mark Deuze, available here. This paper offers a critical review of scholarly research on fixers, the local collaborators of foreign correspondents, in conflict reporting. Based on a thematic analysis of work that addresses news fixing, we summarize what we know about fixers in conflict zones while using postcolonial lens to further …
Decolonizing Conflict Journalism Studies: A Critical Review of Research on Fixers Read More »
By Yaroslava Tymoshchuk On a September afternoon in Kramatorsk, Donetsk region, I take a selfie. My sunglasses reflect the railway station. I still have a few hours before my train goes to Kyiv, and I want to capture the moment. It was 2021, quite recently — given that Ukrainians perceive the time after February 24 …
The language of war: Human stories prevent casualties from becoming statistics Read More »
By Savit Vit War is a word that, for me, had always been associated with something tragically distant, forgotten, and unacceptable in the modern world. In my job, I often had to read and write about war. About a war that was once upon a time or somewhere very far away. And each time I …
By Ruslan Khalapov On February 24, a call from an employee of our television channel woke me up. At five in the morning. “The war has begun. We are being bombed,” the colleague told me. I was surprised that I knew how to act and what to do. My “emergency suitcase” had been packed a …
“We are working on the information front of the war” Read More »
