War reporting and investigative journalism at risk from crippling costs

PARIS — The cost of war reporting and investigative journalism is becoming prohibitive for media outlets, campaigners have warned.

With Internet giants like Google and Facebook soaking up advertising revenue while using the content of traditional media for free, quality journalism has been caught in a double bind, experts say.

At the same time it had become more expensive and dangerous to cover conflict zones, said Jean-Francois Leroy, the head of Visa pour l’Image, one of Europe’s most important photojournalism festivals.

While many journalists were killed covering the Vietnam and Yugoslav wars, “journalists were not then actual targets,” he said. “That has all changed.”

A total of 50 journalists have been killed so far this year, according to Reporters Without Borders.

As well as setting out to kill reporters, insurgent groups and criminal gangs have also kidnapped them for ransom.

“It has become more and more expensive to cover conflicts like Iraq. Security costs have exploded. You need fixers, bodyguards, translators and drivers,” Mr. Leroy said. “A few years ago

estimated that it cost $10,000 (€8,600) a day to cover a story in Baghdad.”

Investigative journalism has also been squeezed as the mainstream media’s economic model has been crushed by tech giants, said Gerard Ryle, head of the Washington D.C.based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, the body behind the Panama Papers and Paradise Papers revelations.

“Journalism is fighting for its life at the moment,” Mr. Ryle told AFP.

“It is dying. The advertising models that sustained reporting — never mind investigative reporting — are broken, and the media has not found a way to replicate them,” he noted.

“Businesses are cutting back and the first thing that they cut is investigations because they are expensive. Not only are they time-consuming but they are also very risky,” he added.

“You are not always going to get a story and even when you do it can be very expensive to defend legally, you can end up in court fighting” big firms who don’t want the truth to come out. —