Field Journalism in Conflict Zones: What Decades on the Front Line Taught Me

Field Journalism · War Reporting · Mohamed Bourbiza

My field experience began in 1994 during a post-diploma internship, and my professional journalism career began in 1998. The first assignment was not a war — it was a political crisis, the kind that smells like a war three weeks before it becomes one. You learn to read the silence before the shooting starts. That is the first thing nobody teaches you in journalism school.

The credential nobody asks for

Across decades of reporting and field work in more than 107 countries — Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Lebanon, Sudan, Syria, Yemen, and dozens of other places in varying degrees of fracture — the question I have been asked most often by young journalists is: how do you get access?

The answer is always the same: you show up. Access is not a press credential. It is not a letter from an editor. It is presence, consistency, and the willingness to be there when it costs something to be there. I have covered stories for Al Jazeera, the Daily Mail, BBC, Reuters and AFP, and in every single case the access came before the assignment — not because of it.

What the camera cannot show

Documentary filmmaking taught me something that print journalism never fully could: the weight of what is not in the frame. When you are filming in a conflict zone, you make hundreds of choices every minute about what to include and what to leave out. Each of those choices is a moral act. The camera is not neutral. Neither is the journalist holding it.

I won the Best War Correspondent award and the Golden Pen in Doha in 1999, during a period when international coverage of the Middle East was dominated by geography rather than context — reporters parachuted in for the explosion, gone before the dust settled. I have always believed the story lives in the dust.

The language question

Reporting in Arabic, English, French and Italian has given me a structural advantage that I did not fully appreciate for the first decade of my career. Language is not just communication — it is access to a different reality. When you interview a source in their own language, without a translator, you are receiving information that does not survive the translation process. Nuance, hesitation, irony, the word choice that reveals the speaker’s allegiance — all of this disappears in translation.

I founded Euro News Agency in London in 2008 precisely because I believed that multilingual, field-led journalism could fill a gap that monolingual outlets — however well-resourced — could not. That belief has not changed.

What survives decades in the field

The technology has changed completely. The economics of journalism have changed almost as completely. What has not changed is the fundamental transaction: a person with a story, and a journalist willing to go to where that story lives. I have done that from 107 countries on six continents. I intend to keep doing it.

— Mohamed Bourbiza · Field Correspondent · Founder, Euro News Agency · London

Continue reading

• Documentary filmmaking from the field: how I approach every assignment
• Euro News Agency: independent journalism from London to the world
• Selected work and field assignments
• About Mohamed Bourbiza

Safety and duty-of-care standards for reporters in hostile environments are set out by the Committee to Protect Journalists and the Reporters Without Borders safety guide.