A snapshot assessment of today’s British media would show an understandable obsession with the world’s finances – relieved in the recent past by the everlasting subject of the weather – and, at the other end of the spectrum, a less comprehensible fascination with private and public activities of real and overhyped celebrities and what they say during unscripted broadcasts or in the green room after them. These two extremes are at present providing employment to large groups of journalists, not least commentators and columnists who articulate the half-formed thoughts of viewers and readers.

Not a bad life, really: the worst that can happen to your health is catching a nasty cold through standing in a snowstorm outside No. 10 Downing Street in response to someone’s demented notion that a picture of the best-known front door in Britain will add an irreplaceable immediacy to a routine report. Cutting-edge journalism? Hardly, but comfortable work compared with others who are also employed in gathering news, but who constantly face genuine danger, and the possibility of losing their lives.

The International News Safety Institute recorded 172 violent deaths among journalists and their support staff in 2007, down to 109 in 2008 as security improved in Iraq. A high figure is expected in the current year: Russia, Latin America and Africa are particularly dangerous. And even if death isn’t lurking, there are other dangers: Colin Freeman of The Sunday Telegraph and the photographer José Cendón were kidnapped in Somalia last year and held for six weeks until a deal freed them. (Articles by Michael Leapman and Nick Pollard in this issue of the BJR discuss the problems of security, particularly as they affect the British media.)

The most poignant testament to these perils was published three days after the January 8 murder of Sri Lankan Sunday Leader editor Lasanthe Wickrematunga, shot dead by gunmen as he drove to his office in Colombo. In a moving personal testament, composed in the certainty that he was about to be assassinated, he wrote about his newspaper’s independent stance on the corruption of Sri Lankan politics and the conflict between the Sinhalese majority and the Tamil Tiger rebels: “People often ask me why I take such risks and tell me it is a matter of time before I am bumped off. Of course I know that: it is inevitable. But if we do not speak out now, there will be no one left to speak for those who cannot, whether they be ethnic minorities, the disadvantaged or the persecuted.”

Exactly one month after Wickrematunga’s death, his paper deplored in its editorial column that the police investigation had made little or no progress, commenting: “The fear among journalists is that investigations into the killing will go the usual way and slip into the limbo of forgotten things. That is what has happened to investigations conducted into the killings and other physical abuse of Sri Lankan media personnel before.”

This year the BJR celebrates 20 years of publication, so it seems an appropriate moment to mark the heroism of reporters, photographers and support staff who have chosen the sharp end of the trade rather than softer options and to recall the tradition in which they have risked their lives. The nature of the media, with their avoidance of making themselves into the story, means that frequently their sacrifices are unsung.

In 1944, reporting from Italy after he had spent nearly four weeks on the Anzio beachhead where an Allied invasion force was pinned down by German resistance, Ernie Pyle, of the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain, had this to tell his readers across America: “When I write about my own occasional association with shells and bombs, there is one thing I want you folks at home to be sure to get straight. And that is that the other correspondents are in the same boat – many of them much more so. You know about my own small experiences, because it’s my job to write about how these things sound and feel. But you don’t know what the other reporters go through, because it usually isn’t their job to write about themselves. There are correspondents here on the beachhead, and on the Cassino front also, who have had dozens of close shaves.”

About a year later, on an island in the Pacific, Pyle was shot dead by a Japanese bullet. His death, and those of every other journalist for whom an assignment proved fatal, put credit crises, foul-mouthed television personalities and even the weather into proper perspective. As the awards season looms, those who collect prizes for covering non-hazardous patches of life’s colourful quilt would do well to remember them as the champagne corks pop. BH