The Guardian rounds up the best comments, questions and answers from our recent live chat on tomorrow's journalist – what tools and skills will they need to survive and thrive?
“Female reporters are essential” to foreign reporting. That was the message from award-winning journalist Alex Crawford, as she delivered the Bob Friend Memorial Lecture at the Centre for Journalism last night.
Crawford said: “Egypt was and is a dangerous place for reporters whether you are male or female. The whole of the coverage of the Arab Spring has been incredibly dangerous for all of us."
Crawford added "but should that be an argument for not sending woman reporters to Egypt – or any front line? Of course not.”
Her impassioned argument is given more significance this morning by the news of the death of Marie Colvin, another multiple-award-winning journalist, in Syria.
In recent months, Reporters Sans Frontieres (RSF) suggested that all media platforms should stop sending female journalists out to Egypt following assaults on journalists including Mona Eltahawy, Caroline Sinz and Lara Logan.
Crawford said: ““This has been a dangerous series of revolutions to cover – whether you are a man or a woman. It can’t get more hostile than what many of us have had to cover over the past year. It is still tough – and women reporters face a lot of danger on the frontline.
"Female reporters are essential – especially in parts of the world where culturally it is not easy for women to talk to men they don’t know. It is female reporters who have been instrumental in making sure female voices are heard.”
Although RSF later changed its advice, it still claimed women were in more danger than men - a view given short shrift by Crawford.
"Have we stepped back to the Fifties? Are we really suggesting the news organisations should not send women into difficult and dangerous places now after years and years of trying to convince editors to give us a chance?
"In Egypt alone over the week that Mona and Caroline were attacked, there were at least 27 journalists who were beaten, detained or harassed – all but four were male."
She also said:”The coverage of the Arab Spring has seen a huge number of women journalist filing, from bloggers, camera operators, producers, translators, photo-journalists, newspaper writers and of course television correspondents.”
Her coverage of Libya was used around the world, she was able to access areas other journalists couldn’t because she built a relationship with the rebels after the march in Zawiya, in March last year. She returned in August after the town had been reclaimed by the rebels.
Crawford said: “even those who didn’t know us had been told about Sky News – the channel who had filmed and Broadcast the terrifying crackdown by the Gaddaffi forces and exposed the lies.”
Using these connections her team was able to enter Green Square on the back of a truck live to demonstrate that “the support of Gaddaffi was crumbling “breaking to the world the collapse of the Gadaffi regime.
Crawford concluded her talk and said: “Women are in the ascendancy in war reporting all over the world, and we shouldn’t even be discussing whether or why.“
