Have video camera, will report: New journalists roam the world in search of stories

New journalists roam world in search of stories

SAN FRANCISCO — Young, adventurous and versed in the tools of an Internet age, a brave new generation of journalists is spreading out across the globe to tell the stories they care about from an often personal perspective.

But it can be a hazardous undertaking, as a number of the new storytellers have discovered recently after falling into unfriendly hands in places like North Korea and the Middle East.

“Journalism is no longer a closed profession,” says Marc Cooper, director of Annenberg Digital News at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication. “Whether people like it or not, it’s open to everybody, increasing the number of people who are going to stick their necks out and they’re going to get in a jam.”

Last week, three Americans were detained by Iranian authorities after they apparently strayed across the border while hiking in a popular tourist destination in Northern Iraq.

One of the three, 27-year-old Shane Bauer, is a freelance journalist and documentary maker who had been in the area to check out the elections in northern Iraq’s Kurdish region. Also detained were two others along for the hike.

In another case of Americans abroad, Euna Lee, 36, and Laura Ling, 32 reporters for former Vice President Al Gore’s Current TV media venture, were released Tuesday from North Korea following a meeting between former President Bill Clinton and North Korean leader Kim Jong Il. The two had been arrested along the Chinese-North Korean border in March and sentenced in June to 12 years of hard labor for illegal entry and engaging in “hostile acts.”

Earlier this year, freelance journalist Roxana Saberi, 32, was imprisoned for four months in Iran after being convicted of spying for the United States. She was released after an appeals court suspended her eight-year sentence.

The three currently detained in Iran, Bauer, 30-year-old Sarah Shourd and 27-year-old Joshua Fattal, are graduates of the University of California, Berkeley. Bauer and Shourd, who also has written freelance articles for various Web sites, are described by friends as passionate adventurers interested in the Middle East and human rights. Fattal also was well-traveled and worked at a sustainable living research center in Oregon.

Iran said Tuesday they are under arrest for illegal entry.

Iranian state media cast doubt on whether they were really hikers. But friends say there is no indication Bauer or the others had any interest in going to Iran. They appear to have simply gone astray.

In some ways, nothing has changed — there always have been young people ready to chase stories into dangerous places, says Cooper, who has reported from around the world for 30 years.

But the means of telling those stories has changed; it is much easier to get the necessary equipment, and instead of just a few traditional news channels, journalists have the voluminous audience of the World Wide Web.

“The barriers have been dropped. That applies equally to telling the story of the cat in the tree in your neighborhood to reporting on the border of Iran and Iraq,” Cooper said.

Bauer graduated with honors from Berkeley in 2007 with a major in peace and conflict studies — a discipline based on finding peaceful alternatives to solving conflict. His professors were impressed by his dedication.

“A stellar student, exemplary, he really stood out,” said department chair Jerry Sanders, who taught Bauer in two classes. “He first came to my attention because when he wrote a paper he had these long, annotated footnotes meticulously cited for whatever he said. He spent a lot of time making sure of his sources.”

Sanders told Bauer he could have a great career in academia. “Right away he said he was interested in journalism,” the professor recalled. “He always wanted to go out and do interviews on the ground. That was his passion.”

As a junior, Bauer went to Darfur to investigate the situation. “He wasn’t satisfied with the one-note explanation of things,” said Sanders. “He wanted to capture all different sides of it.”

Colleagues said Bauer’s passion for telling the stories of real people caught in the middle of conflict took him to Damascus, Syria, where he could travel to Palestine, Iraq and other war-torn areas.

Through his pictures and prose Bauer provided personalized accounts that sometimes reflected the tension of working in the region.

In a February story for New American Media, he described being approached by a man at a gas station outside Falluja: “His face is wrapped in a red checkered kafiyya and he’s dressed all in black. My heart pounds and I brace myself as he nears our vehicle, looking in our direction. As he passes the front of the car, he turns and waves, continuing up to the highway to flag a ride toward Baghdad.”