Kurt Schork Memorial Awards

I went to the above event at the Frontline Club last Thursday with Rachael, Victoria and David.

The evening was hosted by Christiane Amanpour of CNN, who I interviewed at the end of the ceremony for View Magazine.

Kurt Schork was a New York Times reporter who, along with cameraman Miguel Gil Moreno di Mora, was killed in an ambush in Sierra Leone in May 2000.

A trust was set up in Kurt's memory, and honours two journalists every year - one freelance foreign correspondent and a local reporter who has covered contentious or controversial stories for the local media.

The winner in the first category this year was Steven Vincent, a freelance foreign correspondent and art critic for the New York Times who was killed in Iraq in 2005, after claiming in an article that Basra's police had been infiltrated by Shia death squads.

The award was accepted by his wife, Lisa, who has since his death spoken out on behalf of journalists who travel to perilous locations to report on stories about which they care passionately. She discusses her thoughts on her husband a year after his death in an interview with the National Review Online.

The winner of the award for a local reporter went to Massoud Ansari, an investigative journalist working for Pakistan's Newsline magazine. Ansari rose to prominence when he published an article that brought to light a link between Pakistani extremists and the July 7 London bombers.

Listening to the presentation of the awards was a humbling experience. Hearing the terms in which both Schork and Vincent were described by all those who spoke about them revealed a passion for their work that would inspire anyone with a goal of working as a journalist, and reinforced my belief that the work journalists do in unimaginably trying circumstances is hugely important.

Following the presentation of the awards, a panel discussion was held on the question: With technology forcing huge changes in the media and will the future belong to local and freelance journalists?

The discussion was chaired by Amanpour, and the panel comprised Ansari, David Dunkley-Gyimah, Paul Eadle (founder of OutThere News) and Nazerin Ansari (diplomatic editor of Kayhan, a Persian weekly paper).

While some interesting points were raised by the panel and the audience, I felt that the discussion failed to really get a hold of the question. What I wanted to gain from listening to people with such a wealth of experience in the industry was a clear vision of where things are headed. Instead, I think too many of the questions asked of the panel were motivated by the desire of many journalists to get their own opinion heard.

I spoke to Christian Amanpour after the discussion ended, and as soon as the interview has been edited I will post it up.

A final bonus of the evening was that we got the chance to meet Adam Westbrook, who is on the PGDip course at City University. As well as writing a blog that is regularly championed by David Dunkley-Gyimah, he is a really nice bloke and it was good to talk to him about the differences between our respective courses.

Thanks again to David for getting us into the event (and the bar afterwards).