What should information professionals do when activists replace journalists in the production of news? The dramatic conflict in Syria is a war fought on two fronts: military and media. The difficult...
Paul Wood
BBC News
Paul Wood is a BBC Middle East correspondent covering the Syrian uprising. He has been smuggled across the border into Syria some eight times and was Baba Amr in Homs while it was besieged and under bombardment. For his coverage of Syria, he was named Journalist of the Year by the UK Foreign Press Association; as well as winning the David Bloom prize from the US Radio and TV Correspondents' Association. Paul has covered a dozen wars in fifteen years as a BBC foreign correspondent. He was in Baghdad for the invasion of Iraq and in Falluja during the battle for the city in 2004. He and his team filmed from inside a crowd hit by multiple suicide bombs in Iraq (winning a Golden Nymph at the Monte Carlo Festival and a Bayeux Award for War Correspondents). He travelled behind Serbian lines with Kosovar guerrillas in the 1999 NATO bombing and has reported on conflicts in Bosnia, Macedonia, Chechnya, Darfur, the Palestinian territories, Afghanistan and Libya.
An average of two journalists are killed every week carrying out their work. Most are local journalists investigating crime and corruption and their killers are seldom found. Ten years ago the news ...