Where journalists risk their lives to report

PEOPLE ask me why I invest in newspapers. Aren’t there other ways of getting a better return? Technology? Property? Pork belly futures? The answer is simple. Journalism. That crucial pillar of democracy that holds the powerful to account and gives voice to the people whose lives they affect.

My father Alexander has suffered personally for the journalism of his campaigning newspaper in Russia, Novaya Gazeta. The legal campaigns and threats of violence against him and our family over the years habitually ebb and flow according to who his reporters at the paper have been exposing for corruption, violence and other wrongdoing.

But his suffering is nothing next to the risks his staff are taking.

Everyone rightly remembers the murder of Novaya Gazeta’s brilliant reporter Anna Politkovskaya, murdered at her block of flats in Moscow after running a series of exposés of Russian atrocities in Chechnya.

But there have been others, too. In fact, the paper has had five staff killed, including the shocking double murder in a Moscow street of our journalist Anastasia Baburova and the lawyer, Stanislav Markelov.

Killed in reprisals for telling the truth. Killed as warnings to others not to follow their path. Killed to extinguish the flame of independent journalism in Russia.

For, while the deaths and kidnappings of western reporters and cameramen working for big media companies are rightly given global coverage, the stories of local journalists doing crucial work for regional news media rarely make even a news-in-brief. Since then, we have interviewed the families of journalists who have disappeared, heard the heartbreak of colleagues of the fallen, and, of course, given voice to the reporters themselves to talk about their painful stories, sometimes of torture, rape, or threats to them and their families. Often, they are not easy to read. Stories of abuse rarely are. But without fail, they contain something else: courage, determination to continue reporting and – most importantly – hope that their work will change their countries for the better.

And they are right to be hopeful. Only good reporters – with their trustworthy coverage of events and independent investigatory skills – can give people the power of knowing how their leaders and other powerful members of society are really behaving. And from that knowledge can come the pressure, and the power to change.

Journalists need the biggest audience possible for their messages to do their work, bringing pressure to bear against the wrongdoing they expose.

We have a duty to help them. – The Independent