There is no crime called ‘committing journalism’
NY Times reporter Barry Bearak was jailed in Zimbabwe while he was covering the elections. In this article, he talks about the miserable condition of the prison in which he was confined for four days. More interesting is why he ended up in jail in the first place.
Normally, he says, he takes great precaution when traveling to countries hostile to independent reporters. For instance, he won’t take his lap top or recording devices into the country and he won’t take notes or conduct interviews in public– instead he will do interviews and note-taking behind closed doors and dictate his stories using his cell phone to someone across the border.
He also usually leaves off his by line to the stories he writes so officials can not link him to the articles. But because the NY Times was pressing him to file four stories a day for the Web site, he threw caution to the wind…and it ended up costing him a sore back, a case of scabies, and “an infestation of microscopic mites that swelled my hands and wrists to nearly twice their size.”
And he was lucky. He could have been in the hell hole for years. So my question is– what do we do when we graduate and get jobs at hot shot newspapers that demand we file four stories a day for their Web site? Does delivering breaking news, in actuality, deliver you to the breaking point? What can we journalists do to protect ourselves against this sort of slave driving that technology now makes possible?