University of Padua police and officials confront demonstrators trying to block entrance to an administration building over university investments in armaments and the war in Gaza. Photo by Madi Koesler (COM’24)

Journalism & Media

Staying Safe When Reporting Gets Dangerous

New COM summer class in conflict journalism taught by a photographer who’s been there

Pulitzer Prize–winning photojournalist Greg Marinovich has covered more than his share of violence and tragedy. He has lost friends and survived plenty of life-threatening situations. He also knows what it’s like to go home afterward and find yourself climbing the walls with guilt or post-traumatic stress.

Now a College of Communication master lecturer in journalism, Marinovich decided it was time to teach survival skills to BU students who may soon be wading through conflicts and crises in the course of their own careers. He wants them to know the things he learned the hard way as a freelance photographer for the Associated Press, the New York Times, and other publications, covering stories from South African townships and on Bosnian battlefields. 

This summer he taught what may be the only class offered this year where the homework can get you whacked with a police baton in a foreign country—JO551 Conflict & Crisis Reporting: Covering Hostile Environments Smartly, Safely & Ethically.

“He talks about the mistakes that he’s made and how to know when to leave, when to back up, when a photo’s worth it because of the danger factor,” says Madi Koesler (COM’24), who took the four-week course this summer at BU’s Padua Academic Center in Italy. “And so all of that was going through my mind.”

Koesler and two classmates were walking past the university one day when they heard shouting, which turned out to be a protest over the University of Padua’s investments in the weapons industry. Koesler suddenly found herself on the front lines, photographing a clash between students protesting and university police or guards.

“The students were trying to barricade and stop university officials from going in and out of this door, I believe it went to the president’s chambers,” says Koesler, who is finishing a bachelor’s degree in journalism this summer. “They were pushing against each other, shoving more than fighting. And the university people weren’t happy to have cameras… I got my camera hit twice, once with a baton and once with the police officer’s hand.

“I was lucky to be taking that class, because I just used the skills that I’d been taught and kept my cool and stayed focused,” she says. “I got this picture of the guy, who has his hand on my shoulder, like he’s pushing me, and I got like the picture of his face.”

A South African native, Marinovich made his name covering the bloody end of that country’s apartheid and later coauthored The Bang Bang Club: Snapshots from a Hidden War, about the experience. His syllabus for the Conflict & Crisis Reporting class, which he plans to teach again next summer, covers from hostile environment awareness and battlefield first aid to ethics, codes of conduct, social media, and “the objectivity mirage.”

While drama accrues to the urgent stay-or-go decisions journalists must make in places like Gaza and Ukraine, Marinovich also focused on the the more complex moral dilemmas that can arise when the imperative to report and tell a story may also endanger the lives of sources or present wrenching dilemmas over remaining only an observer. These decisions too must be made on the fly and sometimes in just seconds. 

“In Croatia, the first day I went to the frontlines, and it was on the losing side in the beginning of the war, people who had mostly handguns and infantry weapons against tanks, jets, the whole caboodle of the Yugoslav national army,” Marinovich says. “And I would dash across the street to try to get a better picture. And these civilians, who’d essentially become soldiers over the last month, were looking at me, like, ‘What the f-ck is wrong with you?’”

“If you know that you’re ignorant of a situation, you’ll do a lot better,” he says.

He began to think seriously about creating the class around the time of the Ukraine war. In the Mideast and elsewhere, journalists were being targeted with violence more often. Major media outlets, including photo agencies, had become more risk-averse. A new cohort of freelancers, less resourced and less experienced, were entering the battlefield. Marinovich says he wants to teach students the things there may be no one around to teach them anymore.

Ten students eventually signed on, with varying skills in photography, reporting and writing, and audio journalism. (Video was too involved for a short class, Marinovich says.) The five-week class was open to upper-level undergraduate and graduate journalism students, as well as students from other colleges (one signed up).

“I wanted it to be a hothouse thing, like you do when you’re on assignment and you’re stuck with fellow journalists 24 hours a day,” Marinovich says.

“Many times you live together, sometimes not. But you work together. I wanted them in a place where they didn’t know the lay of the land, they probably didn’t know the language or only very poorly, and the culture was different. It didn’t have to be dramatically different, just different enough that it wasn’t running around Boston, wasn’t the joy of life on Commonwealth Ave.”

The northern Italian city of Padua offered more than just architecture and gelato. It’s a huge university town, Marinovich says, with a long-running, well-organized, and highly political squatter culture, not unlike the Occupy movement, and facing an influx of migrants and refugees from Africa and the Middle East, overlapping with human trafficking. Fertile soil for journalism. There was even a major photojournalism conference scheduled for the same time they’d be there, which, among other things, provided guest speakers for the BU class.

The curriculum also focused on the workaday difficulties of reporting in conflict zones—how to work when the language and culture are not your own, how to build trust among refugees, combatants, and local civilians who may have few reasons to trust outsiders and many reasons not to.

Like, for example, the activists in Padua who said, “Don’t show our faces.” Some of the students turned around and left, Marinovich says, while others spoke to the BU students for two days until they said, okay, you can photograph us.

“It was a safe space to learn, in a very micro way: how do you deal with language barriers? How do you go about building trust?” says Faith Imafidon (COM’25), who is finishing up her master’s in journalism. “Meeting new contacts and seeing how one person will lead you to the next person, to the next story, and how you’re able to build reliable sources and trust. How to follow a story.”

Imafidon and two classmates worked together on a project following Spina, an umbrella group for student collectives in Padua, which has been going since the 1980s.

“We ended up coming back to this one student named Alyssa, who was a really wonderful example of a young person whose needs are not being met by the municipality,” Imafidon says. “She was a foreign student who was half Tunisian, half Russian, and she came to Padua and spent like the first six months homeless, despite having a scholarship from the University.

“We looked at her journey, and how she was embraced by this collective, how she kind of found her own footing and her political voice through these collectives.”

Journalism undergrad Andrew Botolino (COM’25) worked with another student to document the experience of migrants coming to Italy across the Mediterranean, from countries that included Somalia, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh.

“Their stories are powerful ones of strength and resilience, and there are slices of really pure joy in there, as well as a tremendous amount of trauma,” Botolino says. “And then the flip side of that is, how I’m impacted. And I’m still journaling about that and coming to terms with how that experience has impacted me, not only as a journalist, but as a person.”

“A couple of the students struggled with the edginess and with some of the intimacy they had to deal with in the storytelling,” Marinovich says. “But I think when it’s a group like this, and they’re all living together in the same dormitories, and they have class every day, they push each other.”

The students absorbed the lessons—and their real-world resonance.

“I am still unpacking this class,” Imafidon says.