Tribute: TRIBUTE TO THE RORY PECK TRUST SONY IMPACT AWARD WINNER

Chaired by: Alberto Romagnoli, Editor International News Tg1, RAI, Italy

Contributors: Tina Carr, Director, Rory Peck Trust, UK; Phil Cox, Freelance journalist and winner of the Rory Peck Trust Sony Impact Award, UK

The session starts with a roll call of media workers killed in 2004, shown on screen to the audience.

Tina Carr: Hello I'm not Alberto Romagnoli, I'm Tina Carr, Director of the Rory Peck Trust. Thank you all for staying and not rushing off for lunch. That list of names is incredibly moving, many of the names on that list are freelancers. This isn't a freelance event but it's called News Xchange and freelancers have a major part to play in the exchange of news around the world. All of you this year have paid value to the contribution of freelancers in Iraq but please don't forget it isn't just Iraq, it isn't just this year, it's all the time everywhere in the world and freelancers are dying, freelancers are being injured and freelancers are being imprisoned for speaking out and trying to tell the truth. The Rory Peck Trust has many supporters and colleagues and organisations we work with here, thank you all for that. For those of you who don't know we support the families of those who are killed, who are injured, who are imprisoned. We also try to honour them and I'd also like you to honour them by listening to the words of a freelancer who has been on the frontline this year, he is the winner of the Sony International Impact Award, which is part of the Rory Peck Awards which were held last week in London. These are the awards which honour the work of freelancers and this particular award was chaired by Alberto Romagnoli and I will leave him to talk to you, thank you for your support and please remember those all the time who are out there.

Alberto Romagnoli: Good afternoon everybody, it was good you could come. It was a difficult choice obviously, we have talked for two hours about the risks involved in our job but there are still people like Phil. We had examples of good journalism and we finally chose Phil Cox's reportage about Darfur because it was original, he was one of the first people to go in and we understand from this morning how sensitive this issue is and we wanted to understand the human participation, he shared one month of his life with local people and I think that sharing the lives of people is the first task of a journalist that maybe later on wants to attract attention to these people and maybe change or influence public opinion. So how did you get the idea to get into Darfur when this story was unknown when nobody or very few were talking about it?

Phil Cox: First of all thank you to the Rory Peck Trust and Sony for bringing me here. Just with regard to the safety of freelancers, I think our safety is really in the hands of the powerful and prestigious people here who are the news editors of the world and if they speak with one united voice really they speak for us and our safety. Regarding Darfur I came by this story by chance when I was walking down a corridor in Amnesty International one day, I was there for a completely different story and I overheard somebody say, 'why is nobody covering Sudan, why doesn't anybody do anything about it?' So I finished the conversation I was having and went back and asked the lady, 'what is happening in Sudan?' and she started to talk about Darfur and the scale of the numbers and the people involved and the possibility and what Amnesty International believed that the Sudanese government was conducting a campaign of ethnic cleansing. I then spent about four of five months just researching the issue and finding out that there was a big black hole of news in Darfur. Iraq was going on. It was Africa. It was very hard to get to, there had been some Arab journalists who had tried to cover it from the Sudanese side it was almost impossible to get in and they had landed in jail. So that was really how I first came to the story.

Alberto Romagnoli: And so you were facing a lot of risk, were you aware and were you prepared to run this risk of living with militia-men and living undercover?

Phil Cox: : Well I'm a documentary film-maker first and foremost not specialising in news and I shoot all my own stuff. I went first to the news organisations and I said, 'look there's a story happening in Darfur and Darfur was a non-word nobody knew where it was and it was very hard to suddenly go with a story on Darfur and for me it was a great learning experience how the media will pick up on story when it's nothing and then it's on CNN primetime and it becomes a big story. It needs certain components, it needs a large statistic, it needs a sound-bite and it needs images. So first of all it was hung off a Channel 4 report on the North/South peace process and there was a small report on Darfur there with some images that I'd managed to get out through the rebels but then I wanted to go and for a freelancer there were real problems, whether the story was still going to be big enough in Darfur and who could send me, so I spoke to Newsnight, BBC and Channel 4, and especially Channel 4, they were very keen on the story but there was an issue of insurance and whether really there was a story there to be able to send me though they wanted to. So I then decided can I get it and if I do get it I must get it journalistically, so I borrowed some money from some friends cycled around on my bicycle in London and emptied peoples' pockets and set off. It's not quite as haphazard as that, I'd done my homework, I found a guide people who had grown up with the rebel leaders, were they going to take me in? what would our route be? And tried to cover myself security-wise from an extract plan and all that sort of stuff.

Alberto Romagnoli: So you never had any training. Do you think it is necessary for somebody doing this kind of job?

Phil Cox: I had worked in Iraq the year before, I made a long film for Channel 4 so I had been extremely lucky to go on an AKE training course that they paid for and it's something that freelancers ourselves cannot pay for. I was lucky because now broadcasters won't send us unless we have the insurance. Which is why the Rory Peck Trust sits so well in looking after us as freelancers in offering places and advice for insurance and I hope that all the people here do pass on what the Rory Peck Trust do. Safety was a paramount factor and I wasn't running in haphazard and I was considering. But there's such a huge hole in the news there and I thought and the statistics were so big and nobody was going there and nobody seemed to be able to get in that for me it was a risk worth taking.

Alberto Romagnoli: OK I want to thank Phil and the people like him who still run the risk because they love the job and we are going to see his pictures, so thanks to everybody, thanks to the Rory Peck trust who gave us this opportunity to think about.