When Journalists Die

All conflicts begin to seem more real, closer and bloodier when one of your own dies.

I didn’t know Marie Colvin. Or Anthony Shadid. Or Rami al-Sayed. Or many other journalists (and citizen journalists) who died on the front lines. But I often spoke to them on scratchy phone lines from London to get them to tell extraordinary stories on the radio.

These names are part of a producer’s mental database deployed often when the editor says, “That’s a good story, but who can we talk to?”

When you find out, that the people who you turned to are no more, it hits you.

Rami Ahmad Alsayeed,1985, father of 18 m.o little girl, Marym, was killed during shelling over #Homs this afternoon. twitter.com/NMSyria/status…

— NMSyria (@NMSyria) February 21, 2012

Being a journalist often demands that you to be unaffected by world events. Gun battles, dead civilians, terror strikes, bomb blasts, hurricanes, earthquakes – these are grave events – and make the news.

But these are people you don’t know. You feel a sense of empathy, sure, but it cannot be a personal experience.

In the case of journalists, even if you didn’t know them personally, it somehow becomes personal.

Suddenly, all journalists – western or eastern or citizen, senior or junior, photographers or producers – become people who wanted to tell a story and put their lives on the line for it.

It is a moment that forces you to pause and reflect.