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 »
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 »
An interview with German journalists Niklas Münch and Tobias Hausdorf In their podcast Hinter den Zeilen, Tobias and Niklas point to the diverse forms of injustice and discrimination in media labour. In late December 2021, they released a podcast about fixers, their role, and their position in the international journalistic ecosystem, for which they communicated …
“No journalist is an island”: Transparency, trust, and “radical” conflict journalism Read More »
By Jessie van der Broek Johana Kotisova investigates the position of fixers and stringers in conflict zones They are indispensable in journalism, but their work is often overlooked: fixers, the locally-based collaborators who assist foreign war correspondents with their work. Since the outbreak of covid-19, these local contact persons, who are already in a vulnerable …
Local collaborators of war journalists are even more vulnerable due to the pandemic Read More »
Before 2014, Iryna worked as a media expert at the Kyiv-based Institute of Mass Information. After the Euromaidan protests broke out, journalists started to ask her for advice. “When the war started, nobody was ready for that, including the journalists. They did not have bulletproof vests and they did not know how to wear them. …
“In the early phases of the war, we couldn’t even love” Read More »
