I’ve been freelancing in South Asia, the Middle East and Africa since 2003. When the Mubarak regime shut down Egypt’s Internet last week, I couldn’t help wincing for all the reporters, especially freelancers, who were caught unprepared. During the two years I lived in Cairo I kept a satellite phone for work in Darfur, southern Sudan, and other places where mobile networks didn’t exist or were unreliable. It never occurred to me a day would come when a journalist would require the use of a Thuraya in the middle of Egypt’s capital. In periods of intense breaking news, logistics can be as important as brains and courage.
* Don’t count on local networks: Reporting and blogging from Egypt took a giant hit when the government shut down the Internet and mobile phone networks. Freelancers in countries including Sudan, Yemen, and Algeria (not to mention Pakistan and Bangladesh), either individually or as a collective, should keep BGAN terminals on hand. These satellite Internet terminals are small, cost about $1000 and are fed by prepay scratch cards that you can top off via email. At the very least reporters should have a Thuraya or other pre-paid satphone on hand.
* Keep spares: Spare SIM cards and phones, cameras and memory cards, contact lists and cash. What happens when thugs seize your stuff? You become a frustrated bystander. In Sudan, a Zain SIM card costs just ten or fifteen Sudanese pounds (about $6), has a lifetime validity, and provides mobile Internet service for pennies pound a day. If I was based in Sudan, I’d buy three or four and keep them for a rainy (or sand-stormy) day.
* Seed your sources: Prepare for curfews and roadblocks. Provide your sources and collaborators in locations around the country with cameras and mobile scratch cards to ensure they can feed you information when you’re separated. If you’ve got the resources (and not many independents do), give a Thuraya—loaded with your spare numbers and the numbers of your clients—to your most trusted or most important source. (This last suggestion is a double-edged sword: It can pay big reporting dividends during a curfew or martial law. But if your source is part of a vulnerable population, they might risk charges of espionage if they’re caught with a satellite phone, which are banned in many countries.)
Great post. Very helpful. Another huge thing would be for editors to stop twisting the their stringers' reports into a gross perversion, or inversion, of what was gathered; stop using the narrative and language of govts. Example: Mubarak is a U.S.-subsidized dictator (not "president"), no matter what Obama or other Mubarak-friendly govt officials call him. If this is objectionable, then you must explain why it is right to refer to Saddam Hussein as a brutal dictator, etc. Also, VP Suleiman oversaw the Egyptian end of the CIA's rendition-and-torture program — allegedly, directly so; he is the iron-fisted former head of Egyptian intelligence (not just Mubarak's right-hand man, etc.). If you object to this characterization, then you must explain why it is perfectly fine for the AP et al. to call the Syrian president's rule iron-fisted, etc.
Posted by Dan A. on Tue 8 Feb 2011 at 08:19 PM
In The Independent, Hosni Mubarak rates a mention:
[Yet none can hold a candle to True Grit. Having taken $155m in the US alone, when it rolls out across the rest of the world in the coming weeks it will certainly eclipse their highest-ever global gross (No Country's $171m) with ease. Ethan suddenly pipes up. "I just found out Bill Clinton really liked it. And Dick Cheney! They've given it the thumbs up!" Perhaps they should be on the poster – Clinton and Cheney together at last? Joel starts laughing uncontrollably. "The next person we've got to get in there is Hosni Mubarak! He may have some time on his hands soon."]
"Reporting Lessons for the Next Revolution" is a concrete and interesting post. But the question I have for CJR is, where is the analysis of the performance of the American media in the Egyptian uprising, the most important story of 2011?
I do not need to read any more trivia this week about American journalism in search of its own belly button.
My "True Grit" nomination is Anderson Cooper of CNN, who should be the American President instead of the wobbling PR-obsessed shadow of himself Mr. Obama. Anderson Cooper's report on the lies of the regime in Egypt is outstanding journalism, the best that I have seen this year. He is a journalist with courage and good judgement. As for the cipher people at the CIA, you are an embarrassment. Set up a country schoolroom for yourselves at your wretched HQ and go to work on some serious books, such as Mark Ashcraft's 2010 Canadian edition of "Cognition." Learn how to think, you helpless intelligence drones and dullards of the beltway.
Shuffling online media into trivial new patterns will not cut it. Who is going to come forward to start up The Beltway Soporific? That is the news source I will drink in every day.
How about a nomination for True Lack of Grit? Let me pause to gather my disgust. The pathetic and bureaucratic senior editors at The New York Times. What a gutless and dreamy Egyptian performance. Wake up, NYT.
If I can recommend a Canadian writer for a "True Grit," it will be Dan Gardner (Ottawa Citizen and National Post). Obama take heed. Gardner has the power to penetrate your Washington fog. Even if his columns will not be appearing in The Beltway Soporific.
Posted by Clayton Burns on Wed 9 Feb 2011 at 12:35 PM
It would be a good idea to read this Gardner column carefully, and to consider the Guardian report:
The law applies to Bush, too
BY DAN GARDNER, OTTAWA CITIZEN FEBRUARY 9, 2011
[Do laws apply to the United States and its president as they do to other nations and men? [...]
Barack Obama stuck his fingers in his ears, as he has from the first days of his administration. The pawns and peons immortalized in the Abu Ghraib photographs may have gone to prison, but far more senior officials who committed far worse acts, and those who ordered them to, have never been investigated and prosecuted by the U.S. government. And they likely never will be.]
THE GUARDIAN:
Egypt's army 'involved in detentions and torture.' Military accused by human rights campaigners of targeting hundreds of anti-government protesters. Chris McGreal in Cairo guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 9 February 2011 23.46 GMT
Posted by Clayton Burns on Thu 10 Feb 2011 at 12:25 AM