“This is the worst war we've ever seen. And they're getting away with it.”
—The late journalist Marie Colvin, as written in a personal obituary penned by Channel 4’s Lindsey Hilsum. Colvin, a reporter for the Sunday Times, was one of two western journalists killed after the shelling of a neighborhood in Homs, Syria on Wednesday. [Channel 4]“I think the reports of my survival may be exaggerated. I’m in Babo Amr. Sickening, trying to understand how the world can stand by and I should be hardened by now. Watched a baby die today. Shrapnel, doctors could do nothing. His little tummy just heaved and heaved until it stopped. Feeling helpless. As well as cold! Will keep trying to get out the information.”
—Slain reporter Marie Colvin’s last dispatch, posted to a Facebook group for conflict journalists and rights reporters. She was killed this morning in a mortar attack.
Before Marie Colvin died in Syria, she had one major complaint with her newspaper — her stories, which she risked life and limb for, weren't getting read by a wide audience because they were behind The Sunday Times of London's strict paywall. Days before her death, she tried to work around the system.
mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.comBut Ms. Colvin’s frustrations were also more particular than that: she worried that her accounts of indiscriminate bombing by forces loyal to the Syrian government were not able to reach the widest possible audience.
Days before her death, she asked a fellow journalist to sidestep the online subscription requirement for her newspaper, The Sunday Times of London, and share her latest article from Syria with nonsubscribers. “Getting the story out from here is what we got into journalism for,” she wrote in a message that was republished on Wednesday by Bill Neely, the international editor for ITV News in Britain.
“You have my permission to post it, as in I will take the firing squad in the morning,” Ms. Colvin said, indicating that her bosses might object to the reposting of her articles elsewhere. “I’m just not able to technically do it, as I am still in Baba Amr.”
This puts a seriously human face on a problem widely plaguing the newspaper industry — how do you get your stories read and paid for? The Times’ paywall, implemented by News Corp. in 2010, is the worst of the worst, as you can’t even read excerpts from the stories without a subscription. Newspapers need to make money, yes, but when does the public interest, which Marie Colvin was deeply interested in, take precedent?
Would That I Were a Badass
This is Marie Colvin. She was a war correspondent who died in Syria the other day covering a story the Syrian government doesn’t want told.
Just look at her.
She personifies everything I idealized when I was young. Living a life of adventure in pursuit of the story. She was a journalist and a woman.
Journalism is now the serpent eating its tail. The 24 hour news cycle demands updated content on the hour, so the eloquent words of the war correspondent are distilled to 30 second soundbites that segue to a safe and shiny studio where an actor is ready to shill his latest tripe.
I don’t have anything against tripe. Tripe can be fun. I simply have a distaste for tripe mixed with news. News is news. Entertainment is not news.
Listening to candidates referring to the elite media and treating women’s issues as though they’re quaint, polarizing and marginally worthy—in 2012—boggles my lady brain.
Just look at her.
