Abstract
We knew papers couldn't afford many foreign correspondents on staff any more, but surely they can pay better for freelance work
Two years ago, fresh from being made redundant from The Daily Telegraph foreign desk, one of my first acts in my new freelance career was to pen an obituary for my own profession. In these very pages back in 2016, I wrote a piece about the death of the old-school roving foreign correspondent, a job I'd been lucky enough to do for a decade. The best years of my professional life had been cut short by yet another round of bloodshed at Telegraph Towers, and no great surprise either.
Much as we loved covering wars and disasters, my globetrotting colleagues and I were an expensive luxury in an era of digitally-induced financial meltdown. Besides, in an era of Facebook, Twitter and citizen journalists, those distant revolutions and far-off elections could just be covered much more cheaply from the office - quite possibly, I fear, without readers spotting much difference.
Dancing on your own vocational grave, I can attest, is a depressing experience. But it wasn't much fun for those reading it either, judging by the comments I got afterwards. Other middle-aged foreign hands fretted to me that they too feared the chop, wondering if they should jump before they were pushed. Those I really felt sorry for, though, were the aspiring foreign hacks in their 20s, whose careers I'd written off before they'd even begun. Many had approached me for advice over the last decade, and in the past I'd always been encouraging. Now, with the Telegraph having axed not just me but the Middle East editor, Asia editor and Africa correspondent, I felt like advising them to become accountants instead. Either that, or to think about joining the Telegraph's burgeoning ranks of social media desks (last year, they advertised jobs for no fewer than three Snapchat editors).
Yet in the finest tradition of Fleet Street obits, my reports of the death of foreign correspondents now appear to have been premature. As a follow-up to my piece of two years ago, the BJR asked me to look into whether the foreign beat still held any appeal for the millennial generation. At first, this looked like simply banging a few extra nails into the coffin I'd already built. After all, given what some of my home news colleagues write about “snowflakes”, it's hard to see them standing the heat in any newsroom, let alone the world's more challenging corners. No “safe spaces” in Syria, and all that.
But while a few may be content to report the world as seen through Twitter and Instagram, most of the 20-something reporters I canvassed said very much the opposite. For proof, look no further than the huge popularity of the “Vulture Club”, a closed Facebook page set up a few years ago for foreign hacks in war zones (yes, you can imagine where the “vulture” bit comes from). Originally conceived mainly to pool safety tips, today it's a forum to swap info on anything from fixers in Mosul to express visas for Burkina Faso. A virtual reality version of London's Frontline Club, it makes the job infinitely simpler, if a little less romantic.
However, with nearly 8,000 members worldwide - many of them British - it proves that there's clearly no shortage of foreign-beat foot soldiers around, from old-school freelance print hacks through to multi-media vlogger-blogger types (no doubt filing to some Snapchat editor somewhere). And far from being easily put off, the pay and conditions that some of the “millennials” told me of require almost missionary zeal to put up with.
Earnings, they said, now often barely cover living costs, let alone finance a mortgage. Bureau jobs - once the reward for a stint as a stringer - are as much a relic of the past as the Telex machine. Also passing into the “bygone” category are much more basic perks, such as having your expenses paid.
True, foreign desks have always taken advantage of the young, mustard-keen newcomer. As a freelancer in Iraq 15 years ago, I lost count of the number of times I heard fellow freelancers complain that The Independent had offered them £150 for 1,000 words. “Yes, but you'll be writing for The Independent, which'll be good for your portfolio,” the Indie's foreign desk would tell them, entirely straight-faced.
That kind of p***-taking, though, used to be the exception. Now, increasingly, it's the norm, according to Leila Molana-Allen, a documentary- maker and photographer who quit a steady job on The Economist's video desk 18 months ago to freelance in Beirut.
“I love the job, and would never complain about having to work 20 hours a day sometimes, as that's always been the case,” she says. “But at least in the old days you were acceptably paid. I've been offered 50 dollars a piece by some smaller online outfits, and some have even asked me to work free. When I say ‘no’, they tread out the old line that it's good exposure.”
Part of the problem, she believes, is that many desk editors back in London or Washington are themselves youngsters these days. Few have worked abroad, and therefore have no first-hand experience of foreign beat economics. Hence the offers, for example, of 200 dollars a day for assignments in Lebanon's dicier corners, including the costs of drivers and fixers. “They think that going out on a story in Lebanon is like popping down to the Houses of Parliament.”
French without tears
Her worst rates came from a well-known website which, early in her career, offered her and another journalist 300 dollars between them for 1,500 words and 10–15 pictures. Colleagues told her to refuse, arguing that it drove wages down for everyone else. In the end, though, she took it so that she could add the website to her CV. When money is really tight, scruples become hard to afford too.
Against these odds, many reporters are drawn to wire agencies instead - traditionally viewed as slightly humdrum, but now one of the last sources of staff jobs in an era of newspaper cutbacks. Particularly well-spoken of is Agence France-Presse (AFP) - less well-known in Fleet Street than Reuters and A P, but today still hiring regularly. Rather than being chained to a desk in the Paris HQ for years, reporters can soon get sent to Baghdad or Lagos. And as a French-run, union-friendly outfit, pay and conditions are a welcome change from downsized, demoralised British newsrooms.
“Many people have joined AFP in recent years because they want adventure and want to write foreign news,” says Peter Hutchison, 33, an ex-Telegraph trainee who is now AFP's Mumbai correspondent. “AFP provides them with a fantastic chance to go abroad, the likes of which are few and far between at British papers now.”
AFP alone, though, cannot offer enough jobs to scratch the itchy feet in many British newsrooms. “I get loads of young people asking me about becoming a foreign correspondent, but there are so few opportunities with the British media,” says Lindsey Hilsum, international editor at Channel 4 News. “The BBC employs more journalists in foreign bureaux than any other news outlet in the UK, but there are still a lot of frustrated young journalists stuck in the Broadcasting House newsroom when they want to be overseas.”
Of course, if nobody else will send you, you can always send yourself, as I did back in 2003 when I quit a job as roadworks correspondent on the Evening Standard to go to Iraq. Carrying on that tradition today are the likes of Helen Nianias, 30, who spent her 20s feeling similarly underchallenged at the Architects’ Journal and the News of the World's women's magazine.
In 2015, the sudden death of a friend made her re-assess her life, and she took herself to Greece to cover the migrant crisis, landing commissions from Vice and Scotland on Sunday. Since then, she has also reported from Uganda, Kurdistan and Kosovo, although like Molana-Allen, she says the pay rates are often “unworkable”.
One notable exception, she finds, is The Guardian's Global development website, an outlet for developing world reportage that is funded by the Gates Foundation. These days, it is much loved among many foreign stringers for taking pieces that other editors might deem slightly worthy. Yet much as Fleet Street might have a limited appetite for aid agency stories, these days NGO-funded press trips are often the way that foreign coverage is affordable. “If a newspaper isn't prepared to pay your travel costs, it's increasingly the only option,” Nianias says.
Indeed, when aid workers and journalists gather in some warzone watering hole, it's often the latter who now struggle to buy their round. “I spend everything I earn every month, without many luxuries,” says Molana-Allen. “Yes, there's the odd cocktail, but your social life is also your main source of contacts. I'm proud of what I've achieved, but how sustainable it is long term I don't know. I've just turned 30, and affording a mortgage is still a long way off - plus I want a family one day.”
What do parents say? Both Molana-Allen and Nianias, say they benefit from supportive middle-class families, who don't see money as everything. Molana-Allen's father edited PC User magazine, and is excited about his daughter being in the racier end of the business, although he “sometimes wakes up in a sweat, thinking why didn't she become a corporate lawyer?”.
Financial security, though, isn't the only worry. As the murders of the likes of James Foley show, being a foreign correspondent is a more dangerous game than ever, and all the more so when freelance budgets make it tempting to cut corners on good fixers. The dangers aren't just on the front line either. In Beirut last year, one of the stories the British press pack covered was the murder of Rebecca Dykes, a young British diplomat strangled by an Uber driver on her way home after a night out. It was a reminder of the risks posed to all young women living independently in Beirut. Yet as Molana-Allen points out, her own budgets are so low that she can often barely afford a cab home in the first place.
It doesn't take a tragedy like that, though, to expose how fragile an existence it is. In a job where a bad day at work can involve injury, kidnap or trauma, there's no telling when you might suddenly have to quit. Leaving the career you love in such untimely fashion brings on enough gloomy introspection as it is. But if you've also got no money to show for all those years on the road, the sense of self-doubt can be even worse. Especially if the only place you've got to return to is mum and dad's spare bedroom.
Still, whatever they might lack in pay, job security, expenses, prospects, healthcare, mortgages - and general suitability as marriage material - today's millennial foreign correspondents are clearly not short on what has always been the key quality: commitment. On which note, a plea on their behalf to all those foreign desks out there. You know they're not in the job for the money. But must they do it almost literally for the love of the job alone? Come on. How about at least a few expenses?
Colin Freeman is author of Kidnapped: Life as a Somali Pirate Hostage and The Curse of the Al Dulaimi Hotel (and Other Half-Truths from Baghdad). He is available for work.
