Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Getting Ready, Getting Started, and Getting Lost in Translation
- 3 What's the Story? News Judgment, News Pitches
- 4 Getting to the Sources (and Keeping Them Alive)
- 5 Being an American Abroad – Perceptions of Journalists
- 6 Eyewitness Reporting: Getting to the Scene
- 7 The Costs of Being There to Count the Bodies
- 8 Your Byline Today, Mine Tomorrow: Teamwork and Competition
- 9 Access, Censorship, and Spin: Relating with Foreign Governments
- 10 Flacks, Spooks, GIs, and Objective Journalists: Relating with the U.S. Government Abroad
- 11 Getting It Out, Getting It Edited: Filing News, Working with the Desk
- 12 The Evolving Milkmen: Writing for an Audience
- 13 Purpose and Influence of Foreign Correspondence
- 14 Eight Decades of Bearing Witness and Telling the World's Stories: Conclusions
- Bibliography
- Index
4 - Getting to the Sources (and Keeping Them Alive)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 November 2015
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Getting Ready, Getting Started, and Getting Lost in Translation
- 3 What's the Story? News Judgment, News Pitches
- 4 Getting to the Sources (and Keeping Them Alive)
- 5 Being an American Abroad – Perceptions of Journalists
- 6 Eyewitness Reporting: Getting to the Scene
- 7 The Costs of Being There to Count the Bodies
- 8 Your Byline Today, Mine Tomorrow: Teamwork and Competition
- 9 Access, Censorship, and Spin: Relating with Foreign Governments
- 10 Flacks, Spooks, GIs, and Objective Journalists: Relating with the U.S. Government Abroad
- 11 Getting It Out, Getting It Edited: Filing News, Working with the Desk
- 12 The Evolving Milkmen: Writing for an Audience
- 13 Purpose and Influence of Foreign Correspondence
- 14 Eight Decades of Bearing Witness and Telling the World's Stories: Conclusions
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
I'm awfully persistent, you know. … I was always there … over and over and over again. … I need all the time to ask people about what the situation is like and what are you thinking, even if I'm not doing a story. … I'm genuinely interested in having the conversations. … I genuinely want to go and sit there, whether you're sitting in a nice backyard like this or whether you're sitting on the floor, sharing a meal with somebody who lives in the Christian colony over here. … So I think that has assisted my access for all those reasons. And I go all the time. I mean, people see me everywhere. “Oh yes, Kathy, we know Kathy. Oh yeah, Kathy, for sure.” It's not because Kathy is any great shakes, it's just that Kathy's always there. (Gannon, 37)
In the shaded garden of her Islamabad home on a cicada-filled spring evening, Kathy Gannon was describing how she develops sources on one of the most challenging foreign beats – reporting from Pakistan and Afghanistan since the late 1980s, work that nearly cost her her life less than a year later, when Gannon was severely wounded and AP photojournalist Anja Niedringhaus killed on assignment in Afghanistan. But on that peaceful Sunday, we had taken a walk through the mud-houses neighborhood across an unpaved alley from her villa, and a man getting a shave at the street-stand barbershop, the women strolling in their brightest saris, and the children busy with a pickup cricket game had all smiled and waved at us. Journalists like to say they are only as good as their sources – and Gannon's persistence, which has gained her access from top government leaders to children in tribal areas, is the main trait shared universally across time and space by AP correspondents who have developed strong sources at the Holy See, among the Taliban, and everywhere else.
Access to “the man on the street,” rulers, and insurgents is the foundation of foreign reporting, and each source presents unique challenges in different cultures and political systems. This chapter details how correspondents have found and kept their sources, from North Korean children to the anonymous spokespeople (yes, there is such a thing) for the Élysée in Paris.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- AP Foreign Correspondents in ActionWorld War II to the Present, pp. 81 - 124Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2015