“Freelancers are really on their own,"
Nicole Tung, a freelance photojournalist, told CBS News in an interview about
the recent beheading of another freelance journalist, James Foley. Tung and
Foley were working along in the coverage of Syrian conflict. They were only the
two of many freelance conflict journalists, risking their lives for the story.
According to Committee to Protect
Journalists’ data, just under half of the 70 journalists killed in Syria since
the conflict began in 2011 have been freelancers.
Today, as the media landscape shifts,
media organizations’ reliance on freelance journalists and photojournalists
continue to increase. While they make
significant contributions to the conflict coverage, in comparison with staff
journalists who are sent to the war zones by their media organizations, risk
that the freelance journalists go under is immense. The staffers are provided
with the required hostile environment and emergency first aid training, health,
life, kidnap and ransom insurance, costly protective equipment, fixers, transportation
and psychological support for post coverage as well as their monthly salaries.
On the other hand, many freelance journalists go in the conflict zones
regardless of any of support system provided, a lot of times not even being
able to afford them in hopes of finding the desired stories and selling them to
various media organizations for several hundreds of dollars at most.
Does lack of a support system
(training, insurance, protective gear, being able to tracked down in cases of
kidnapping, emotional support system, transportation, fixers etc.) affect freelance
photojournalists coverage of conflict zones? If yes, how?
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