There is no substitute for ‘on the ground’ reporting, even if the pandemic has made it more difficult

I first got my taste of remote reporting in Iraq. As the country became mired in a violent civil conflict, with sectarian violence erupting in 2006, it became too dangerous for correspondents and their local colleagues to visit some of the war-ravaged cities or blood-soaked rural valleys. Journalists learned to make do by cobbling together reports from phone interviews and reports filed by trusted local correspondents, who themselves sometimes were forced to rely on networks of contacts rather than on-the-ground accounts.  

Later, those tools would come to help correspondents who were on the ground, supplementing, for example, reporting from one side of a battlefield with phone interviews and video footage from another.  

Over the last decade, as emboldened authoritarian regimes began tightening visa and accreditation rules, the tools of reporting remotely became one way to circumvent censorship attempts by regimes seeking to criminalise journalism.  

A big problem began to arise, however, as news organisations and reporters learned they could cut costs and reduce the stress of travel by assembling reports based on telephone interviews and YouTube clips. The rise of “scoop” and “hot-take” journalism also hastened the decline of actual reporting on international affairs.  

News organisations found they could get as many “clicks” or “eyeballs” from a piece with scintillating or provocative analysis of a day’s event, or an “exclusive” based on a leaked document or interview, than from a serious on-the-ground report about, say, an armed conflict or even a hotly disputed election contest.  

Outlets began to question whether it was worth spending money on transport, lodging, security and local assistance when they could come up with the same number of pageviews or generate as much “buzz” with a scintillating “take” on another organisation’s news story.  

Some of us have tried to resist. I once quietly resolved to leave a news organisation the moment my editors rejected a proposal for me to take a trip to Libya on the grounds that “you do such a good job with phone interviews”.  

The coronavirus pandemic over the last year has not only raised the bar for justifying the increased costs of on-the-ground reporting, but dramatically increased the logistical hassles. Editors at The Independent last month enthusiastically embraced my proposal for a trip to Tunisia to cover the 10th anniversary of the Arab Spring uprisings, only for me to later discover the trip would be impossible because of a lengthy quarantine requirement by authorities in Tunis.

Now it was my turn to make the dismaying call: “I guess we can do a pretty good job with phone interviews.”

But news outlets are doing a grave disservice both to their readers and viewers, as well as the topics they are covering, by relying more and more on remote reporting. Not only does much nuance get lost when you’re not on the ground, sometimes the entire story can get missed. Repeatedly I have arrived in a country with the vague expectation of writing a certain story with a certain angle, only to learn that my ideas – and the accounts I had read or seen elsewhere – were off, or that the story had changed, or that there was an even more poignant and powerful angle to pursue.  

Dispatching journalists abroad to cover vital stories is expensive and, in the case of conflict zones, potentially risky. But there’s really no substitute.  

Yours,

Borzou Daragahi

International correspondent