[dc]I[/dc]n Australia, where the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) is the nation’s No. 1 source of news, Anne Barker is a household name, with her stories playing across TV, radio and online. She established her credentials covering federal politics two decades ago, including coverage of the government’s intervention in remote indigenous communities. In 2007, that work won a Walkley Award, Australia’s most prestigious journalism prize. From there, Barker claimed a spot as an ABC foreign correspondent, covering the Middle East during the Arab Spring, tensions with East Timor and, since 2018, a posting in Indonesia.

[caption id="attachment_162928" align="alignleft" width="325"] Anne Barker[/caption]

COVID prompted Barker and other correspondents to make the “heartbreaking decision” to leave Jakarta a year ago. She continues to report from her home in Melbourne, during what has been a news-heavy year for the Australian neighbor and trade partner. Among those stories: a January flight disaster, the announcement of a COVID19 breath-test, and the release of accused Bali bomber Abu Bakar Ba’ashir, who was responsible for many Australian deaths and lifelong injuries to the survivors.

But in addition to must-cover news, Barker has woven more intimate stories about the role of women and children in Indonesian society with coverage that is rich in compassion, nuance and respect. She has also been willing to write about the political and the personal, including the departure of mentor and long-time Indonesian bureau manager Sujanti Tjandra, who left the job after 42 years to join her daughter in the U.S.

As a regular follower of Barker’s story, I wanted to know more about how she does her job: How, as an outsider who now works by remote, she nurtures source relationships; how, as a woman, she navigates in a male-dominated field; and how, in the face of demanding news, she chooses a range of stories.

[dc small]Y[/dc]ou’ve written that you returned to Australia from Indonesia because of the risks in a nation with an overburdened health system, as did many other foreign correspondents. What does that mean for coverage?
ABC is committed to going back, but it’s proving more difficult than we thought. Indonesia is one of the most important to Australia in this South East Asia region, the biggest economy in South East Asia and a lot more stories happen in Indonesia rather than in Bangkok, where we have a bureau. The Indonesian government is accepting of having a large foreign media corps there. If and when I go back, I’ll be working from home in Jakarta for the foreseeable future, which will make it hard for me to do the job in the same way. We may have to hire stringers in other provinces, which we’ve been doing while I’m in Melbourne.

Do the majority of your stories come from your own investigation and interests, or from tip-offs from Indonesian sources? And how have you maintained your source networks while reporting from Australia?
It’s a bit of both. When I was in Jakarta I had the luxury to go and meet people myself, often with a producer who would act as a translator. It’s been really hard, being back in Australia, to organize this; I can’t ring or WhatsApp or Zoom people since many of my sources don’t speak English. You can’t go out for coffee with someone who has an idea for a story you want to chase. Even the producers are working from home in Jakarta. The average story I’ve been working on from Australia has been a long-winded process. I have to ask a producer in Jakarta, or we hire a stringer because we no longer have a camera operator in Jakarta. It means I don’t meet the stringers or the talent. It’s hard, but you have to make do.

In reading bylines of foreign correspondents, it seems there are still many more male names than female. Why is that?
I think that’s something the ABC has tried to address over the years; over the last five years of ABC correspondents, I’d imagine women would make up roughly half of those postings. At the same time, they want the strongest candidate for the job. I guess there are a lot of women who are thinking about whether they want to have children and can be a correspondent at the same time. One woman I know would have loved to be a correspondent, but she had children at an age time when it would clash with that ambition. I know a few cases where for some female correspondents, the husband stays at home with the kids. It’s a really demanding job. I think if I had children, I’d find it very hard to have the same commitment to doing the job. It can be all-consuming and it’s only gotten harder over the years because of the extra demand for 24-hour online news.

As a female correspondent, both in Jerusalem and Jakarta, did you get support from fellow correspondents or is it a competitive environment?
It’s both, actually. Competition in the media is healthy. In Jakarta, all the foreign media are pretty much in the same building. Amanda Hodge, the correspondent from The Australian Newspaper, and her producer work on my floor. The BBC is on the floor downstairs. James Massola, who was with Sunday Age of the Sun-Herald, was two floors below but I barely saw him. All these people become good friends when you’re living in Jakarta. It’s no different to being in the press gallery in Canberra, where I worked for five years, or anywhere in the media in Australia where you get to know colleagues from various organizations. One of my best friends when I worked in Darwin worked for a rival organization. You’re not going to tell them about the story you’re chasing, but it doesn’t mean you can’t be good friends. If I have coffee with Amanda Hodge, we just don’t talk about stories. It’s an unwritten rule unless we’re all covering the same story.

You wrote about the legacy of Sujanti “Yanti” Tjandra, who decided to leave the ABC Jakarta office after 42 years. The story included the fact that Yanti had sent her daughter to the U.S. 20 years ago to live with a relative, hoping to protect her from discrimination as a Chinese Christian in Indonesia. That raises broader questions about women’s quality of life, educational and professional opportunities in Indonesia. Do you feel that women’s stories have not been understood or given enough attention over the years?
The ABC launched a project called 50:50 a couple of years ago, with the goal of reaching 50/50 readership between women and men. They glean data from apps to see how many hits on a story are male or female. They realized that they had to increase the number of stories that are about women to correct the imbalance they’d discerned and to interview experts who are women. But if a man was telling the Yanti story, I think the news values are the same. When I wrote that story, I wasn’t trying to appeal more to women than men, but to any average reader.

Fifty women a day are dying of cervical cancer in Indonesia, which is a story I covered just before I left. I think a male journalist would have been less interested or less aware of that story. On the whole, women journalists are more open to covering those stories.

Are there questions of safety you’ve faced as a woman alone in a foreign country that have caused you to question your work? What measures do you take to ensure you are not assaulted or threatened while investigating and reporting on sensitive news?
One of the things you have to do before a foreign posting is take a course on working in a hazardous environment: earthquakes, war zones, disease and, obviously now, the pandemic. Because I work in a team, when I do a story I’m with a driver, a producer, maybe a fixer if we don’t know the lay of the land very well, and a cameraman. I’ve never felt unsafe working with my colleagues. Your ideal colleague is someone who looks out for you when things get rough, so you make decisions collectively.

Indonesian people are very helpful, very polite; I traveled for decades as a tourist or for work, and never felt threatened. But since the Bali bombings (which killed 202 people including 88 Australians), the threat in Indonesia is very real. There have been terror attacks and, in Jakarta, it’s not uncommon to hear of bag snatching. I only live 2km from work in Jakarta and walked to and from home to work, but late at night, I’d be very reluctant to go out alone in Jakarta. The widespread poverty means you’re a target.

Do you work on numerous stories simultaneously and how do you manage that process?
I often work on more than one story at the same time. I might have a story that has to be done this week, for example, because it's topical or because there are other factors. I might also be looking at another story but know it can't happen for a while — maybe I'm waiting for a key report to be released, or a decision to be made, that will make it a story. I keep notes about stories I'm looking at, with relevant links to reports or information, or interview transcripts, etc. There are also means to summarize this information on a shared page so editors and producers in Sydney are aware of what correspondents are doing, where they're at, and when they might be finished and ready to run.

Did you learn languages and research cultural norms (dress, religious rituals, greetings) before applying and beginning your role as Middle East and Indonesia correspondent respectively?
Learning the language has been on and off, but living there has meant my skills have vastly improved. It makes a big difference to be able to speak to people, even in broken Bahasa. In the Middle East, it wasn’t a posting I thought I’d love. It was a bit more sudden. I learned Arabic for a year when I was in Jerusalem, but it’s very hard to learn a language from scratch when you’re working full-time in a very demanding job. I probably would have been better off learning Hebrew, since I was living in West Jerusalem and working with many Israelis.

What experience and qualities do you believe are essential to success as a foreign correspondent, more so than purely local journalism and news reportage. What experience prepares a journalism student for a career in reporting from, and on, a foreign country? (ie. Travel, language skills, voluntary aid work, etc.)
Read as much as you possibly can, as widely as you can, about the country or region you’re interested in. Know the issues in that region and keep tables on them.
Have a good news sense. It’s essential, to recognize something that may not be in the mainstream media could be developed into a really good story for radio or TV.
You have to be prepared to work all hours of the day, any day of the week. Just when you think you’re going out to dinner, you’ll get called to cover a plane crash. I’ve had to wake a correspondent at 2 a.m. to cover a shooting in LA.
Being hardworking and prolific is very important. They always say you’re only as good as your last story. If that was a month ago, people won’t remember you.

***

Cat Woods is a freelance journalist based in Melbourne, Australia. She writes on music, arts, design, women's wellbeing and fitness.

The post What it takes to cover a foreign country as a woman and during a pandemic appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

[dc]A[/dc]s an Australian, I often feel that locally produced radio news and podcasts are too inward-looking. If the news doesn’t directly affect Australia, or have a strong link to this nation, it receives little more than a brief mention.

I prefer a broader view of the world. And I prefer to get my news via podcasts, which are convenient and concentrated. So in my hunt for both, I came across the BBC Global News Podcast five years ago, and have been downloading every edition since. They are concise, comprehensive and combine international field reporting with expert commentary, incisive questions from the presenter and – importantly – an amusing story in each episode that reminds listeners the world isn’t entirely bleak.

[caption id="attachment_160800" align="alignright" width="300"] Jackie Leonard[/caption]

Jackie Leonard is the presenter of Global News, which is one of the BBC's longest-running and most popular podcasts, drawing close to 1 million listeners a week. The majority of listeners are located in the UK, India, Nigeria and the U.S. but there are also listeners in Bangladesh, China, Ethiopia and, thankfully, Australia. The half-hour of content is drawn from The Newsroom, BBC’s live news show, selecting items for a deeper dive or added perspective into the day’s top stories. (Editor's note: A U.S. analog might be The Daily, which is the 30-minute podcast that explores select news from The New York Times, although The Daily only focuses on one story a day. NPR's All Things Considered is also similar, although it airs over a longer time slot.)

Leonard joined the BBC in 1994 on a three-month trial and was kept on. She worked as a producer and reader for several of BBC’s domestic channels. In 2000, she joined the BBC World Service, presenting Newsdesk, then World Briefing, before becoming a producer and host of The Newsroom. The Global News Podcast launched in 2007, and Leonard has since played a fundamental role in shaping the podcast into an internationally respected source of news and insight, with the help of editor Karen Martin, who joined the team in 2015 and whom Leonard calls a “very good boss.”

After five years as an appreciative fan, I reached out to Leonard to find out more about the hows and whys of her job. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

[dc small]C[/dc]an you walk me through a day of preparing for the podcast, choosing the stories that will run, briefing the host, lining up the audio and ensuring all the stories can be covered within the timeframe allowed?
I focus mainly on the live programs, which go out at 19:00GMT and in the winter months at 22:00GMT. I also, at the same time, spin the Global News Pod plate, if you like, alongside the other producer doing the Global News Podcast. He or she will not just be listening to the program I’m doing, which is The Newsroom. That producer will also be drawing from Newshour, Newsday, Focus on Africa and World Business Report. And if any reporter has churned up something themselves and wants to flag it up, they’ll be in touch with the producer as well. Then, we’ll have a conversation about what needs to go in The Newsroom, which goes out at 22:00GMT.

Then we record the Global News Podcast around midnight. It’s different from live news. With the live news, you’re reacting to stuff as it happens. With the Global News Podcast, you’ll have the most up-to-date coverage of breaking stories and continuing stories, but there will also be the stories that we feel are done and dusted and packaged up, and the most compelling stuff of the past 12 hours.

The Newsroom and Global News Podcast are therefore a tandem thing, happening at the same time.

Where do you source stories for The Newsroom?
During the week, the Newsroom program goes out at 11:00GMT, 1:00GMT, 19:00GMT, 22:00GMT, 2:00GMT and 5:00GMT. So, you are constantly preparing the next one. There aren’t any breaks. You finish the show, you grab a cup of tea, and you start working on the next one. Obviously, there’s breaking news going on, and a lot of the decisions about which stories are covered depend on who we can get. We’re lucky in terms of having language services; we’re wildly lucky to have that resource. We have 20-something languages we broadcast in, though it used to be more. We have offices in Tigre, Ethiopia, all over the place. When the wheels come off on a situation, we have people who know what they’re talking about, who know the region and haven’t just been parachuted in after the story has begun.

Your 300,000 downloads a day demonstrate much how people want to engage with the news despite all we hear about mistrust and disengagement. What makes it work for you?
Over the years, it became apparent that people who are listening to a podcast are not listening to it in the same way they listen to radio. They’re choosing when to engage with the news and they’re concentrating on it.

I used to listen to it at the beginning and the end of the day. There was a period when there were three Global News Podcasts a day, and when that stopped I began to save the two shows and listen to both at the end of the day.
That’s interesting. We experimented with three a day, which was pointed at the American market, because it would mean the extra one was coming out at breakfast time in the US. It became a bit relentless, though.

With constant world news and events breaking, how do you choose one story over another to report on within the half hour allowed for Global News Podcast?
We are very lucky to have bureaus all over the world. Sometimes, producers and reporters from the bureaus and language services will report in to the news desk that they’ve been following a story that’s of interest to their listeners but now is developing into a big thing, so we know we need to get across it. The other brilliant resource we have is BBC Monitoring, which listens to different media in languages across the world, and social media across the world. When things are starting to kick off to be of interest outside the borders of those countries, we have people who can flag those stories. Sometimes, it comes down to how much clarity you’ve got on a story so that you’re not just muddying the waters.

For aspiring journalists who want to work for a global news service, what advice would you give? What skills are essential to global news producers and reporters?
What is vital now might not be in 10 years. I am endlessly surprised by the number of my peers who aren’t even on social media. I’ve long suggested people shouldn’t do media studies because you end up being an expert on the media but knowing bugger all about the world. Being tech-savvy and able to do everything yourself is important now in a way that it wasn’t when I joined the BBC. Digital natives who are always ready to learn the next thing, who aren’t phased by new technology — that willingness to adapt is really useful. I would also suggest being curious, having language skills, being fascinated by business, medicine, economics, politics, history, arts and gaming  — if you have a broad curiosity but also an area of expertise, that’s very useful.

Are these skills the same as those required for reporting news for a domestic audience?
To report and select news for a global audience, you need to be able to step outside assumptions that you have about what people already know because there isn’t necessarily a shared knowledge on cultural aspects. You may need to spell certain things out, explain to people why certain news stories are of relevance to certain people in certain areas. People have different living standards, social mores and expectations; you can’t make assumptions that people will agree with the values and ideas that are common in your country.

Did you study journalism?
No, I studied English and politics. I didn’t know what I was going to do when I finished university, but I had no money to do postgrad studies. I showed up at a local radio station in Leicester, which told me they weren’t hiring but I could do some work for the experience. So I did a couple of days of work experience and learned the combination to get in the door by looking over someone’s shoulder. I just kept turning up and eventually, they gave me some on-air work. They liked how I sounded and started paying me to do freelance pieces. The local BBC station heard me and offered me some freelance shifts, which was enough incentive for the station I worked for to offer me a staff job.

One of the biggest problems journalism has at the moment is that it’s largely made up of middle class people. I could do work experience because I was also working in a pub in the evening and I had the safety net of knowing that, at worst, I could go home to my parents.

When I joined the BBC in 1994, I did a three-month trial period then I was staff. Staff jobs now are the Holy Grail. It’s much more common now for people to be on rolling three-month contracts, which is not just the BBC but most media outlets now. But you can’t live on experience; you can’t pay rent with exposure. I think that’s one of the biggest challenges of the moment —  to increase the breadth and representation of people coming in.

When you are working in global news and there's so much injustice, devastation, war and poverty to report on, how do you emotionally support yourself and your team to ensure it does not become exhausting or depressing to the point of burnout?
There are stories that have inevitably been very hard. The Ariana Grande concert explosion was so hard to report on because it was close to home; the people who were attacked were the ages of my nieces. You could become used to war and destruction and become hardened to it, but even then something cuts through it.

The BBC does provide help to reporters who have worked in very difficult situations and may be suffering from PTSD. On a daily basis, with just lots and lots of stories, there is a dark sense of humour in many a newsroom. So, a sense of humour and camaraderie are essential. We’re a tight-knit team and if someone is out of sorts, we’ll notice and check in on them. Karen Martin, our editor, is marvelous. When she joined in 2015, she offered us a breath of fresh air. She wanted to relaunch the Global News Podcast, to make it more tightly packaged product than it had been. When you have a good boss, it makes a world of difference.

The Global News Podcast always includes humorous stories; it isn’t purely just the hard-hitting news. Why?
There needs to be light and shade. If you have a program which is relentlessly about man’s inhumanity to man, catastrophe and disaster, it becomes overwhelming and people glaze over. Human experience is not all grim and relentlessly dark.

***

Cat Woods is a freelance journalist based in Melbourne, Australia. She writes on music, arts, design, women's wellbeing and fitness.

The post The keys to global journalism: curiosity, open-mindedness and a broad network appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

[dc]A[/dc]s chief fashion critic and director for The New York Times, Vanessa Friedman has written odes to Karl Lagerfeld and Kenzo Takada — major designers who passed this year — and considered the fashion statements made by the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She has explored the choice of outfits of Joe Biden and Donald Trump, and the role of style in how Amy Coney Barrett portrays herself publicly. She also has probed complicated and timely issues: sustainability and the true cost of disposable fashion; the inherent racism within the fashion industry; gender inequality; and the reality of becoming a fashion victim. All this, as she told Storyboard, quite by accident.

[caption id="attachment_160047" align="alignright" width="400"] Vanessa Friedman[/caption]

Friedman joined The New York Times in 2014, after 12 years as fashion editor of the Financial Times. She also has worked as fashion features director for InStyle UK, an arts contributor at The Economist and was the European editor at Elle US. Her freelance work has appeared in Vogue, Entertainment Weekly, The New Yorker and Vanity Fair.

She told Storyboard how her career led her to The New York Times, about the misconceptions of being a fashion journalist, and about the responsibility of reporting on fashion as a cultural beacon within a global environment. Our Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.

[dc small]W[/dc]here did you start your career in fashion journalism?
I’d been an editor at the FT for 11 years and I kind of created the fashion editor role for them. Because of that, I knew a variety of journalists in the space and so when The New York Times was looking for someone, they knew me already and I was one of the many people they contacted.

I’d been in journalism for years before that. My first journalism role was at Vanity Fair, where I started as an editorial assistant in 1992 or 1993. I worked there, then New Yorker, then Vogue and Elle. I moved to England and I freelanced for five years. I worked at InStyle when it launched in the UK for two years, then I went to the Financial Times. That was my first newspaper job and my first job focused exclusively on fashion. Before that, I’d been doing mostly culture.

Was fashion criticism always your goal?
It was NEVER my intention. Nor was being in "journalism." I got into magazines because I loved writing and had snobby ideas about culture. I never studied fashion or journalism and had never considered a career in either. I ended up in newspapers and fashion completely by mistake, but it was a very lucky mistake.

What is the specific role The New York Times wants to play in reporting on fashion and who is the demographic being spoken to?
It’s hard to identify a specific demographic because we reach a broad swath of people. As far as fashion goes, we see ourselves as people whose job it is to translate this particular part of the world for our readers, letting them know what matters to them and how it will affect their lives. I think that’s true no matter what you’re reporting on.

Since 2014, there’s been intense focus on climate change, misogyny and the #MeToo movement, exploitation of fashion workers, and this year, Black Lives Matter and the coronavirus. How has the reporting of fashion been affected by this?
We’ve been reporting on sustainability in fashion since 2009. It’s the same as any issue in any other sector. You look at what these broad social movements are — political, cultural and social change — and how it applies to your sector. Fashion is in the world, and therefore what happens in the world shapes it.

Do you ever struggle to find a story that’s right for The New York Times?
I think the challenging thing can be that sometimes you feel like you need to be part of the conversation happening online when sometimes it’s a better story if you don’t react immediately — if you step back and consider something and think about the broader conclusion you can draw with more time and more reporting.

You’ve written about Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Can you tell me about how that story reflected on her as a person?
To me, fashion is an expression of identity at a specific moment in time. I spend a lot of time thinking about how that applies to people in the public eye, not necessarily just fashion people. For Ruth Bader Ginsburg, I looked at her colors, which were a very deliberate use of clothing to express both her mood and her opinions, and what she thought of as her role as a woman.

Looking at the hotly contested U.S. presidential election, what do you think Biden and Trump have been saying with their choice of clothing on the campaign trail?
Trump’s image is very rooted in an idea of Wall Street meets Titans of The Universe, the Reagan age. His ties, his suits all hark back to that time. Biden is much more interested in looking ‘of the people.’ he’s like your cool dad, and he looks like that with his aviators. Kamala (Harris) just looks very competent and her Converse sneakers are a big thing.

I’ve watched your interview with Matthew Williams on Instagram. You’ve interviewed him and Virgin Abloh among others. Which new designers are you finding most exciting?
From this last round of shows, I was very interested in what Thebe Magugu is doing. I was very interested in what Christopher John Rogers did. I think Charles Jeffrey is very talented. I liked Imitation of Christ – she’s not new, but I think she’s very talented. Bethany Williams was great, and Grace Wales Bonner.

How often do you work with freelancers and what advice do you give to writers who are pitching to you?
We work with freelancers a fair bit on NYT Styles, probably more than most other sections of the paper. The best advice is to just think about your own special body of knowledge. Tell me about a designer, a trend I don’t know about. Obviously, we can’t be aware of what’s happening all around the world, so I really love hearing about stuff I don’t know about.

How do you cope with a 24/7 news cycle?
You just have to decide when you’re not working anymore. Not endlessly checking emails, Twitter, Instagram and trying to plan a little bit. I also have to be tougher with myself and remind myself that it’s not a crisis if I don’t open my email.

Have the Instagram and other live interviews been a nice connection in this time of lockdown?
It’s hard not being in the office, not being able to travel for shows and be around the fashion community which, twice a year. is a very fertile community to be planted in. There were people from all over the world that I’d only see during collections. You just don’ have the same conversations on Zoom as you do when you’re sitting next to each other. I miss that a lot.

Cat Woods is a freelance journalist based in Melbourne, Australia. She writes on music, arts, design, women's wellbeing and fitness. She has been published in The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, Shondaland, Washington Post, Huffington Post and more.

The post The fashion critic of The New York Times sees clothing as an extension of culture appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.