The New York Times—a place full of people who pursued Journo Career Path #1—takes a look at the case of Amanda Lindhout, a wild and fancy-free young would-be journalist who saved up money from a waitressing job in Canada to fly off and report from Somalia, freelance. Hardcore! The she was kidnapped and held for ransom and "abused" for 15 months. Not so cool!

So the story is all, "on the one hand, [blah blah journalism training and preparation and a big news organization are all so important and you can't have amateurs running around, blah blah], and on the other hand, [obligatory nod to the pep of the young go-getters]." But all the wavering is unnecessary. To be a journalist, you don't need fancy training, or fancy technology, or a fancy news organization, or fancy "intelligence":

[Amanda Lindhout's] limited finances also restricted the number of armed guards she was able to hire. Journalists from large news organizations will hire up to 10 gunmen, a private army of sorts, at a total cost of $300 to $1,000 a day.

All you need to be a journalist are plenty of guns.
[Related. Pic via]

A tipster tells us that three assistant managing editors have been laid off at Fortune magazine, presumably as part of the ongoing companywide Time Inc. layoffs. Mediaite confirms that the company did do a round of layoffs today. If you have more details, email us.
UPDATE: We hear five staffers were laid off at SI.com: Two associate producers, a copy editor, a producer, and a production editor, according to our tipster.


Gary Weiss got a peek at a BusinessWeek corporate post-layoff memo, in which the people not fired are referred to as "Individuals ineligible or not selected for inclusion in the restructuring program." Well. How Bloombergian.


Dave Eggers continues to save print! This time by producing a $16, 300-page "newspaper" with content "ranging from Stephen King's reporting on the World Series to explanatory graphics on subjects as diverse as the conflict in eastern Congo and how to make the perfect bowl of ramen." The whole thing sounds great. Except, of course, this six-month long niche literary project has absolutely nothing to do with newspapers or with the continued viability of print, which is dying as a mass medium, naturally, due to its obvious limitations.


From Roy Greenslade: "Twelve journalists were among 46 people murdered yesterday in the Philippines in what is thought to be the greatest loss of life by news media in a single day. Several of the victims were beheaded or mutilated in the massacre carried out by a huge force of gunmen."

And whereas Laura Ling's book proposal sounds like, excuse us, some craptastic "Sisters are so wonderful" Barnes & Noble checkout line gift special pegged to the fact that her sister works for Oprah, Euna Lee's book will actually focus on her insane (but heartwarming) North Korean imprisonment. Which was big news, you may recall!

Keith Kelly says Lee got "a six-figure deal to write her memoir of the imprisonment, tentatively entitled, 'The World Is Bigger Now: A Memoir of Faith, Family and Freedom,'" while the Lings are still "shopping" theirs. Burn notice! The lesson here is, if you ever find yourself caught up in a dramatic case of international crime/ kidnapping, write your book about that rather than trying to use it as a peg for your thoughts on The Meaning of Love, because you are not as interesting as your circumstances, no matter what Oprah says.
[Pic: Getty]

Farrell was taken earlier this month while covering a NATO air strike on Taliban forces in Kunduz, Afghanistan. His driver and translator were also taken.

Keeping with their policy, the Times kept a lid on the story, lest press coverage add more zeroes to a potential ransom. That's the same thing they did with David Rohde, who escaped his terrifying captors last June.

There are few details at the moment, but we'll keep you posted as news trickles across the Atlantic.

Update: So, here's what we know. Farrell was kidnapped Saturday night and, according to local Afghan official Mohammad Omar, U.S. forces plucked him out of harm's way this evening. Unfortunately, his interpreter, Sultan Mohammad, didn't make it.

Last night in a US special forces operation in Chardara district, they managed to free Stephen Farrell but the Afghan journalist Sultan Mohammad was killed by Taliban during the operation.

Update the Second: The Times itself has published a story on this harrowing tale and includes Farrell's personal account. According to the journalist, who holds both Irish and American citizenship, there was a raid by "lots of soldiers," but it was unclear at the beginning what the hell was going on, so he and his interpreter ran for their lives. Only Farrell survived:

At the end of a wall, Mr. Farrell said Mr. Munadi went forward, shouting: "Journalist! Journalist!" but dropped in a hail of bullets. "I dived in a ditch," said Mr. Farrell, who said he did not know whether the shots had come from allied or militant fire.

After a minute or two, Mr. Farrell, who holds dual Irish-British citizenship, said he heard more British voices and shouted, "British hostage!" The British voices told him to come over. As he did, Mr. Farrell said he saw Mr. Munadi.

"He was lying in the same position as he fell," Mr. Farrell said. "That's all I know. I saw him go down in front of me. He did not move. He's dead. He was so close, he was just two feet in front of me when he dropped."

Executive editor Bill Keller said the paper's overjoyed by Farrell's rescue, but are obviously quite upset his interpreter didn't make it.

Image via wallyg's flickr.

Not surprisingly, the ladies are using employer Current TV to channel their ordeal into an explanatory narrative. While the duo do address the importance of their initial story, call out their guide for being a total turncoat and express their deepest hopes their case didn't endanger any border-dwelling activists, the most captivating interesting part, obviously, is their recollection of the capture. From Current's website:

When we set out, we had no intention of leaving China, but when our guide beckoned for us to follow him beyond the middle of the river, we did, eventually arriving at the riverbank on the North Korean side....

Feeling nervous about where we were, we quickly turned back toward China. Midway across the ice, we heard yelling. We looked back and saw two North Korean soldiers with rifles running toward us. Instinctively, we ran.

We were firmly back inside China when the soldiers apprehended us. Producer Mitch Koss and our guide were both able to outrun the border guards. We were not. We tried with all our might to cling to bushes, ground, anything that would keep us on Chinese soil, but we were no match for the determined soldiers. They violently dragged us back across the ice to North Korea and marched us to a nearby army base, where we were detained.

Those of you who are looking for details on their "rigorous" interrogation, sorry, the ladies aren't giving that up so easily. That's why God invented book deals.

Activists in South Korea and China who help North Korean refugees flee their shitty country say that when Ling and Lee were arrested, the entire refugee-saving program was compromised. One South Korean pastor who had helped guide Ling and Lee on their reporting trip says that just days after their arrest, the police came knocking, and confronted him with video footage that the Current reporters had taken of his operation. He tells the NYT:

The Rev. Lee Chan-woo, a South Korean pastor, said the police raided his home in China on March 19, four days after the journalists visited and filmed a secret site where he looked after children of North Korean refugee women. He said that he was then deported in early April and that his five secret homes for refugees were shut down. The children, he said, were dispersed to family members in China, who could not afford to take care of them.

The organization in question, called Durihana, is pissed. They say Ling and Lee were reckless, and that Current didn't follow up with the group quickly enough to keep tabs on what was happening after the reporters' arrest.

Understandable, but not fair. You can hardly blame Ling and Lee for having their records snatched after they were arrested. Could they have been more careful? Maybe. But they wanted to get a story in North Korea, and that involves risk. There's no getting around it. And just as the reporters take risks to get the story, organizations speaking to the reporters voluntarily take risks by speaking to the media. The reward is getting the message out about North Korean refugees; the risk is having what happened happen.

Had Ling and Lee not been imprisoned in North Korea, they surely would have done everything they could to ensure the privacy of the refugee group. But they had this problem: they were imprisoned in North Korea.

If you want to blame someone, blame Kim Jong-Il, for being a crazy evil bastard. Perhaps a kind soul will toss Durihana a book contract, too, to salve the wounds.

Don Imus used to simulcast his show on MSNBC, but that ended with his unfortunate "Nappy headed hoes" incident, and he's been stuck in a less high-profile broadcasting gig since his comeback. But now Fox Business Network is reportedly in talks with Imus to have him simulcast there in the mornings! This would be a great fit. We'll leave it at that.


Hey, a sports reporter for the Fort Myers, FL News-Press was arrested for trying to interview important human "Neon" Deion Sanders at a youth football game. Now the paper is suing the city for false arrest. Deion's personal assistant reportedly "began to cry and was visibly upset about the miscommunication that resulted in Mr. Dorsey's arrest," which pretty much proves the paper is right and also is just funny.


Zargon Shah is a TV reporter with not only an awesome name, but a story to tell. He was kidnapped by Taliban fighters in May and sentenced to die. He had to sit in a room for five hours, waiting for his own beheading. Finally he got the chance to speak to a commander, who freed him so he could show the world the destruction the Pakistani Army was wreaking on the Taliban. Which he was happy to do, for sure! Read his whole story here. It's crazy.


Photojournalism: Is it dying, thanks to amateurs with crappy cell phone cameras, such as you? There are some indications that yes, it is. Which is sad, because your cell phone pictures suck.

From the (North) Korean Central News Agency, your only unbiased counterimperialist source of official DPRK propaganda:

3/21: "Two Americans were detained on March 17 while illegally intruding into the territory of the DPRK by crossing the DPRK-China border." Was apparently true!

6/16: KCNA Detailed Report on Truth about Crimes Committed by American Journalists: "at dawn of March 17 unidentified two men and two women covertly crossed the River Tuman to intrude into its bank of the DPRK side in Kangan-ri, Onsong County, North Hamgyong Province. The two women were arrested on the spot." Also maybe true, who knows? Fast forward to...

8/5: "Clinton expressed words of sincere apology to Kim Jong Il for the hostile acts committed by the two American journalists against the DPRK after illegally intruding into it...The measure taken to release the American journalists is a manifestation of the DPRK's humanitarian and peaceloving policy."

Kim Jong-Il cannot tell a lie.
[Pic: Getty]

The full story has never been told. Current TV and its staff kept a vigilant silence in the interest of protecting Ling and Lee's safety, and the press avoided aggressive coverage over the same concerns.

But some issues have bubbled to the surface. A Los Angeles-area blogger named Babamoto has taken two in-depth looks at Mitchell Koss, the Current TV producer and cameraman who managed to flee back to China at the border crossing where Ling and Lee were captured.

Koss, Babamo writes on Epicanthus.net, shephered the journalism careers of emotive CNN anchor Anderson Cooper and of View co-host Lisa Ling from their early 20s. Lisa Ling's sister Laura and fellow reporter Euna Lee would have fit neatly into Koss' stable of "young, attractive and aggressive... 'revolutionary punks.'"

But Babamo implies their aggression and risk-taking in North Korea might have been unnecessary:

Along with the obligatory gunfire, bomb blasts, drug labs and poisonous reptiles, there are homages to poverty, squalor, hunger and human suffering...Many times, Koss seems to put [reporters] in harm's way just for the heck of it on stories that had been covered before by others.

Ling and Lee's prior work certainly contained its share of fireworks. And the North Korean refugee story had been done before — by BBC, Frontline, CNN's Christiane Amanpour and National Geographic, among others, according to Babamoto. Current's Korean derring-do came as the troubled TV network was trying, against Wall Street sentiment, to mount an IPO (it was canceled shortly after Ling and Lee's capture).

Like others at Current TV, Koss has until now remained silent on the incident. Now that his reporters are free, he could shed light on the purpose of their reporting, as well as answer questions about where they were, exactly, when they were caught, and how he thinks it came to pass.

According to research by the Korea-focused website ROK Drop and its commenters, there are seven bridges between North Korea and China where the reporters might have been captured, assuming they were in fact nabbed on the Tumen River

It's not clear why they would have been on such a bridge; speculation has centered on whether the translator they'd hired in China was in cahoots with the North Koreans and misled the reporters about their location or whether they were shooting footage on what they presumed to be the Chinese side of the bridge when North Korea soldiers rushed them. One ROK Drop commenter even noted it's possible to bribe one's way across the border, but since cameras usually aren't allowed it's not clear why two journalists and a cameraman/producer would attempt this.

Only Current TV knows what's happened. Now that its journalists are, thankfully, safe, it can tell what it knows — or let others go digging for it.

(Pics via Epicanthus.net and ROK Drop)

It's a heartening bit of good journalism news.

(Photos: AP)

Reuters has the breaking news. You have to give Kim Jong-Il credit. As soon as the psycho dictatorial monster heard that his troops had snatched two US reporters last March, he knew he could leverage it into the appearance of respectability. Today, he did. Crazily.

• Original rumors were that Al Gore would be sent over to North Korea to fetch back Euna Lee and Laura Ling, who worked for Gore's Current TV. But Kim managed to get ol' Bill Clinton himself. Fuck a "vice" president.
• Clinton reportedly met with Ling and Lee, and it was "very emotional." We bet. For them, it's possible salvation. For him, hey, some other Americans in this fucked up country! More importantly: there seem to be serious hopes that the women will be coming back to America tomorrow.
• The White House is keeping its mouth shut, except to say what a private, nongovernmental mission Clinton is on. One report said that Clinton relayed a message from Obama to Kim, which the White House denied. Who knows. They can give the crazy man whatever soothing pablum he wants till Ling and Lee are out, then deny it all. This is essentially a hostage negotiation.
• Watch out, North Koreans can be tricky!
• 
  
• Toothbrush-mustachioed xenophobe John Bolton is not happy about Clinton's trip. Huh. Don't you look like an asshole now, John Bolton? Oh yes—here you are on Fox News, just now, sounding like an asshole.

CNN, citing "a source with detailed knowledge of the former president's movements," (Insert your own joke here.) said tonight that Bill Clinton is traveling to North Korea to negotiate the release of Ling and Lee. Clinton's visit to the rogue totalitarian country comes at a time when North Korea's done just about everything in their power to piss of the United States, its Asian neighbors and the world at large, with batshit-crazy missile launches and outlandish threats to develop an arsenal of nuclear weapons to annihilate their enemies. It's also been widely rumored that North Korea's cuckoo despot ruler, Kim Jong Il, is presently gravely ill. The last American cabinet official to visit North Korea, coincidentally, was former Clinton Secretary of State Madeline Albright.

On the face of things it seems that the United States of America probably has no better bullet in its diplomatic gun than Bill Clinton for handling situations like such as these, so sending him in seems to make all kinds of sense. However, it's hard not to think that if he's successful, he'll once again steal the spotlight from his long-suffering Number Twos, Al Gore and Hillary Clinton, but hey, whatever it takes, right? Maybe Bill can take Kim Jong Il for a spin on Ron Burkle's sex-jet, "Air Fuck One," to close the deal? Again, whatever it takes.

UPDATE: Clinton has landed in North Korea.

Clinton is dealing with North Korean ruler Kin Jong Il, a sick, vengeful, homicidal nutjob of an autocrat. His underlings have accused Ling and Lee of crossing their border and faking video of human rights abuses; they've also extracted a confession from the no-doubt terrified reporters.

For now, the woman are reportedly "well" in a guest house in Pyongyang, a sign that the North Koreans still wants to negotiate their future. Clinton's comments are as much of an accommodation as the U.S. is likely to give the country. In response to a probably-planted question at a State Department employee "town hall," Clinton all but apologized on behalf of the journalists, a bid, surely, to win their safe return.

The informal context gives the U.S. just enough wiggle room to say this isn't an official national position:

"The two journalists and their families have expressed great remorse
for this incident, and I think everyone is very sorry that it
happened," Mrs. Clinton said Friday morning during a wide-ranging
question-and-answer session with State Department employees. "What we
hope for now is that these two young women would be granted amnesty
through the North Korean system and be allowed to return home to their
families as soon as possible."

Yes, whatever, we're so very sorry, just send these innocent — sorry, heroic — women home already.

[NY Times]