Robert Fisk interview on Vice Magazine

Vice Magazine is a hybrid of print and electronic journalism. It started out as a smarmy hipster 'zine years back, but recently they've started to cover important issues that mainstream media won't touch. They went to Iraq and talked to refugees and did a profile of a metal band. Their reporting is more magazine-style, but it's still an interesting case of a new type of journalism for the internet age. Although much of the reporting in Vice is done in their multimedia format, VBS, they still cover a good deal of stuff in print. A recent article that I thought was interesting, and relevant to journalism, is an interview with Robert Fisk. It deals with Fisk's experiences as an international reporter, how it's changed since the "War on terror" and how people interact with him.

He's certainly up there with Bill Moyers and Walter Cronkite as widely-respected representatives of journalism, which itself isn't widely respected. Some of the more interesting points was of how coverage has changed. He's highly critical of the lack of street reporting in the Middle East. He talks about how the risk of being abducted is balanced by the need for the public to know. It's an awesome statement for a reporter who was almost killed a couple years back.