From the Battlefield to the Campaign Trail  

Last year, I was invited to attend The New York Times’ Adversarial Reporting Training, a four-day course designed to teach reporters how to stay safe in precarious situations. Known as ART School, the training takes place at a giant photo studio in Brooklyn’s bustling DUMBO neighborhood and includes lessons on conducting risk assessments, minimizing the threat of online harassment, and negotiating protests that turn violent. We practiced dragging weighted dummies across the floor — while being pelted with nerf balls — to simulate transporting a wounded colleague. And we were taught how to change a flat tire and apply tourniquets. 

 Experienced conflict reporters and freelancers who cover dangerous assignments made up a sizeable portion of attendees. But during the two sessions I attended, there were also some unexpected participants — a political reporter caught up in the January 6 Capitol riot; several reporters for The Athletic, the sports vertical; and Guy Trebay, who covers men’s fashion for The Times. 

 Some of the scenarios we gamed out during the training involved assignments that might traditionally be perceived as dangerous. We considered the risks of investigating a Russian government-run doping program, covering a political rally, deploying to a hurricane sweeping through the American South, and traveling to cover a mining strike in the remotest part of the Peruvian Andes. But other scenarios were surprising — assignments like reviewing a Nicki Minaj album (she’s known to have a short fuse and her fans are passionate); covering the NCAA Final Four (sports fans can also be passionate); and a scenario proposed by Trebay, which involved a protest by animal rights activists at a fashion show. Through our risk assessment process, we identified ways to manage each situation — making sure we identified exits, had backup communication, and secured local contacts who could provide support in an emergency. 

 Later, Trebay told me that his made-up scenario was based on an incident that occurred during Paris Fashion Week in 2023. He recalled that a massive crowd swarmed the Palais de Tokyo, surging and pushing, to catch a glimpse of K-pop star Lisa from the girl group Blackpink, who was attending the Celine show — and is known to attract fervent fans. “I’m no fraidy cat,” said Trebay, who covered the 1989 Romanian Revolution and the first Iraq War in 1990. “But this was genuinely scary.” 

Safety training and the broader protocols to protect journalists have undergone a complete transformation because of a shift in how many newsrooms think about and manage risk. The concept of safety training first emerged to support journalists working in active conflict zones, with a focus on those facing the threat of kidnapping. Today many safety courses are intended to help journalists manage a level of ambient risk — both physical and online — that has become a reality across the United States, particularly on the eve of a contentious and polarizing election, and the rest of the globe. Legal threats are mounting, and online harassment is now a routine part of covering the politics beat. Reporting on street demonstrations is particularly fraught. More than 500 journalists were assaulted, harassed, and arrested by police while covering the social justice protests that exploded across the country in 2020, following the murder of George Floyd. More than 30 reporters, including student journalists, experienced similar treatment while covering the pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses in the spring of 2024. 

As the former executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, I helped develop resources and training to support journalists covering war. And while the risk to conflict reporters remains acute — as the unprecedented tally of journalists killed in Gaza makes plain — it’s now also clear the need to support every journalist and every newsroom, along with journalism students. In a climate in which even the most seemingly benign assignments can suddenly turn dangerous, safety is everybody’s business.  

There has always been risk associated with international reporting from conflict zones and repressive societies where the press can’t operate freely. Journalists in the field were expected to manage their own safety, using their wits, their judgment, and the visibility they enjoyed as members of the international media. That changed in early 2002, when Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was kidnapped and later murdered by al-Qaida militants while reporting in Pakistan. It marked a turn in the relationship between Islamic militants and the media. Osama bin Laden had cultivated Western journalists and occasionally granted interviews. Now members of the media were targets. A wave of kidnappings ensued, from Afghanistan to Iraq. Many of them involved journalists from prominent outlets, including Christian Science Monitor reporter Jill Carroll, kidnapped in Iraq in 2006, and New York Times correspondent David Rohde, taken hostage in Afghanistan two years later. (Carroll was released after nearly three months in captivity; Rohde and an Afghan colleague escaped their captors after being held for seven months.)  

The spate of hostage taking on the frontline of the War on Terror forced many news organizations to adapt. Safety training courses for journalists have been around since the Bosnia conflict in the 1990s, but in the face of mounting risk, including the risk of kidnapping, news organizations began offering more structured workshops. They also brought on outside advisors to work with reporting teams and implement new safety protocols. It was not always a comfortable fit, and some journalists chafed at the new bureaucracy. For a journalist “the most important thing is the story, to bear witness,” said Mark Grant, a leading media safety expert who has worked for CNN, BBC, and Sky News and today serves as AP’s vice president for Global Safety, Risk and Resilience. “A private security company needs to keep people safe.”  

HEFAT courses — an acronym for Hostile Environment and First Aid Training — exploded to meet the demand. The typical HEFAT offered in the 2000s was usually taught by a British combat veteran, often one who had served in the Balkans or Northern Ireland. The curriculum was heavy on first aid but also covered situational awareness in a combat environment — how to navigate a minefield and take cover in a firefight. They often included a mock kidnapping replete with rough handling, hoods placed over the heads of participants, and guns flashed around. Many journalists I have spoken to over the years who underwent the training found it eye opening and valuable, but also terrifying and at times traumatic. 

The HEFAT courses were expensive and catered to staff reporters working for major news organizations with sizable budgets for travel and training. But following the Arab Spring, a new challenge emerged. Freelancers were few and far between in Afghanistan and Iraq because getting to the frontline was difficult and costly. The conflicts that erupted in Egypt, Libya, and later Syria were more accessible to independent journalists — and were incredibly dangerous. Despite the risks, news organizations that had scaled back their international bureaus in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis increasingly relied on freelancers for frontline reporting.  

In April 2011, a group of journalists were hit with fragments from an artillery shell while reporting on the siege of Misrata, Libya. Noted photojournalist and documentarian Tim Hetherington died from blood loss stemming from an arterial wound. In response, Hetherington’s friend, writer, and filmmaker Sebastian Junger, established a new organization called Reporters Instructed in Saving Colleagues, or RISC. The RISC course focused on battlefield first aid. (I served on the board.) Because of Junger ‘s prominence and passion, RISC attracted a huge amount of media attention. Among the freelance journalists who enrolled was James Foley, who had been captured by Libyan forces in April 2011 and imprisoned for 44 days.  

Six months after completing the RISC training, Foley went missing in November 2012 while reporting in Syria. It was not until the spring of 2014 that it became clear he had been taken hostage by an emerging militant group called the Islamic State. In August, Foley was beheaded on videotape. Two weeks later, a second American journalist, Steven Sotloff was also executed.  

Over this decade of shifting risk, CPJ adapted to meet the needs of journalists on the frontline. In 2012, we published a comprehensive journalist security guide authored by Frank Smyth, an investigative journalist who later went on to establish his own safety training firm. The guide covered everything from what protective gear to pack for a conflict zone to which insurance to purchase. We created an Emergency Response Team, which grew to become the Emergencies Department, combining direct assistance and safety support. We prepared a series of video training modules on first aid. We brought on leading safety expert Colin Pereira, who helped lead the high-risk team at the BBC, to support our emergency response work. In 2015, another organization called ACOS, for A Culture of Safety, was formed to offer training and other resources to freelance journalists working in high-risk environments.  

Despite these efforts, we kept hearing from freelancers who felt they were being asked to bear the brunt of covering the riskiest stories without adequate support, equipment, or training. One organization in particular was the source of constant anger and scorn — VICE News. Freelancers told us that the culture of the organization demanded that they take extreme risks and paid them too little and too late, causing them to skimp on basic safety. In April 2014, VICE correspondent Simon Ostrovsky was taken hostage by pro-Russian militants while reporting on the conflict in Eastern Ukraine. (He was released after three days.) The following year, Mohammed Rasool, a Kurdish journalist who was part of a VICE reporting team, was arrested by Turkish authorities and held for more than four months in a maximum security prison. The two incidents served as a wake-up call for VICE. In 2016, they brought on Sharbil Nammour, a Canadian-Lebanese lawyer and safety risk management expert, to start up a safety program adapted to the VICE culture.  

When the Syrian Revolution erupted in 2011, the Turkish border city of Gaziantep became a staging area for journalists and aid workers, and a cadre of security experts tasked with keeping them safe. One of them was Jason Reich. In 2012, he founded his own security firm, Collective Security Project. A year later, BuzzFeed joined his client roster. 

BuzzFeed News, the digital startup led by Ben Smith, was expanding rapidly and going head-to-head with larger and more established news organizations, deploying reporters to cover the conflicts in Syria and Iraq. Reich’s services were fairly traditional: Risk assessments, tracking and monitoring of reporting teams, and crisis management. But he was able to take advantage of changes in technology, using electronic devices to monitor reporters in the field. He was also able to use Twitter (now X) and other social media platforms to gain access to unprecedented amounts of firsthand information, including communications from belligerents bragging about their exploits, eyewitness accounts from the victims, and posts from journalists describing their reporting. “The corporate OSINT universe exploded,” recalled Reich, using the acronym for Open Source Intelligence. While Reich saw a huge benefit from tapping into the burgeoning social networks for on the ground information, he later felt conflicted because when it came to his media clients, he was often regurgitating back to them the information that journalists themselves were already posting.  

In 2015, Reich moved to New York to take on a new position at BuzzFeed as the head of global security. When Reich got to the U.S. and began spending time in the newsroom, he came to believe that the distinction between international coverage and domestic reporting from a risk perspective was artificial. There were challenges in both environments that were merging and evolving.  Covering natural disasters — like Hurricane Harvey, which hit Texas in 2017, and the Camp Fire that swept through California killing 85 people the following year — could be just as dangerous as a conflict deployment. Organized campaigns of online harassment intended to inflict emotional harm and generate fear were becoming increasingly common. In a notorious example from 2016, David French, then an opinion writer for National Review and today with The Times, was deluged with vile Tweets including images showing his seven-year-old daughter in a gas chamber in response to a column criticizing the alt-right.  

At BuzzFeed, Reich and his team sought to build an internal “safety culture” and to develop a training regimen that reflected this philosophy. At the heart of their approach was Reich’s belief that risk assessments conducted by security experts often relied heavily on media reports. What if the risk assessment process could be demystified, and started not with a bureaucratic form full of tick boxes, but as a conversation between an editor and a reporter? What if the role of the security expert was not to oversee the process, ​​but to make sure the right questions were being raised? What if the first question a journalist asked in assessing risk was, “Who am I and how will I be perceived?” — putting identity at the heart of the process. Baking these questions in would help support a diverse newsroom working in a shifting environment while breaking down resistance to the idea that reporters and editors have a responsibility when it comes to safer reporting.  

Reich and his team began tweaking the training at BuzzFeed, moving away from the standard HEFAT and developing a new safety course. They eliminated advanced medical interventions — like how to treat a sucking chest wound — focusing instead on teaching a few life-saving skills, like applying a tourniquet or a pressure bandage. (Reich came to believe that providing advanced medical training in such a setting is probably a waste of time and potentially dangerous because most interventions are too complicated to be adequately taught in the limited time available.) They introduced modules on digital security, emotional well-being, and covering civil unrest; they also greatly expanded access to the staff. It was reporters at BuzzFeed who suggested the new name — ART School.  

Meanwhile, at VICE, Nammour underwent a similar process. When he came on board in 2016 as the head of global security, he found that the organization had begun recognizing safety concerns and supporting journalists on assignments conventionally perceived as high-risk, like deployments in Iraq and Syria. But what about the young BIPOC reporter out all night covering a Brooklyn rave? No one saw this as particularly dangerous.  

Nammour set up structures to address this disparity. His approach was to embed in the newsroom the six-person security team, which included Ramy Ghaly, a former Marine combat medic, who had worked on safety protocols at CPJ. Members were deployed on assignments alongside journalists, and their role was to support the reporting process while reducing risk, whether the assignment was in a refugee camp in Syria or a bowling alley in Queens. “We were the physical embodiment of the risk assessment throughout that process,” Nammour explained. Members of the safety team worked side by side with the production teams, sometimes assisting by hauling cameras and other equipment in the field.  

Like Reich, Nammour moved away from reliance on HEFAT courses and began training for a median level of risk. But his approach to training was based less on instruction and more on scenarios. For example, rather than simply inviting a lawyer to discuss the First Amendment rights of journalists at protests, Nammour would have half the class play the role of police dressed in full riot gear defending a medical tent being attacked by protesters. The rest of the class played a group of journalists trying to get an injured colleague through the police line. Sirens wailed and both sides were pelted with water bottles. This exercise, in Nammour’s mind, was less about building tactical skills and more about modeling the kind of emotional resilience necessary to making informed decisions under stress. The training sessions were open to freelance journalists.  

As startups, VICE and BuzzFeed had certain advantages over more traditional media companies with established infrastructure and protocols. But changes were underway across the industry. In January 2014, Mike Christie was appointed general manager of global logistics and security, a new position at Reuters. “I thought 80% of my job was to look after the Olympics and the World Cups and have fun at the special events and that security would be a small addendum to it,” Christie told me. “But it became apparent pretty quickly that actually it was 90% of the job, if not more.” As the former Baghdad bureau chief for Reuters, Christie had an acute awareness of the safety needs of frontline journalists. Seven Reuters journalists had been killed in Iraq, Christie recalled, and “they were tragedies that hit us really hard.” But there was a sense, one that troubled him, that such deaths were an inevitable cost of covering war. More than half of the journalists killed had never been given safety training, he added.  

Christie quickly revamped security training and to bring it on to two tracks — one focused on everyday challenges like covering protests, protecting information, and emotional preparedness, a two-day course that Christie described as a kind of ART School equivalent, and another focused on working in a range of extreme environments, from floods to combat. Participants practiced running in a flak jacket and ​​“sleeping rough” in a hammock or a sleeping bag, an essential survival skill in an environment with no hotel to retreat to.  

The different approaches at VICE, BuzzFeed, and Reuters show how important a news organization’s internal culture is to the execution of its safety strategy. At Reuters, where speed is part of the DNA, Christie had to overcome concerns that risk assessments would slow down the process, which they sometimes did. But Christie forged ahead.  

“Every journalist in Paris needs this training because the protests are so violent there,” Christie explained. “Everybody in Japan needed the training because hey, you could have a massive earthquake and a tsunami and a nuclear emergency on Tokyo’s doorsteps. Everyone has to deal with online harassment, which I think is an existential threat to our profession. Its whole aim is to shut us up, to drive us out of journalism, to make us scared, to get us to self-censor. So, it affects not just a journalist who’s in the Philippines, but a journalist writing about cryptocurrency or pop stars. And information security is more than just online harassment. It’s also defending your sources and defending your information from insidious attacks that come at us all the time through our computers, through our emails, through our phones. And then of course, Covid hit, just reinforcing that every single journalist was in danger.” 

Ultimately, Christie believed, the key to the culture change at Reuters was bringing the general managers into the discussion around safety. “They didn’t have a veto as such, but they needed to know about dangerous things that were going on, and needed to be able to weigh in,” said Christie, who left Reuters at the end of 2023. “The industry as a whole was making those same moves.”  

There was also of course another factor in the shifting risk environment in the United States, unrelated to hurricanes and wildfires. During his 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump made attacks on the media an essential part of his message, using his rallies to single out the reporters in the press pen, who he described as corrupt and lazy. Once inaugurated as president, Trump continued to lash out at critical journalists and occasionally deny them access to press conferences and White House briefings. He called “the fake news media” the “true enemy of the people.” The rhetorical attacks changed the dynamics for journalists interacting with Trump supporters, who often refused to speak with reporters from outlets they disliked. Threats became more common — sometimes delivered by phone, but in at least one instance via a pipe bomb sent to CNN.  

Online as well, the environment for journalists became increasingly toxic. Journalists who criticized Trump — particularly those that the president singled out for scorn — were besieged with harassing messages, often laced with racist and misogynistic language. Some contained explicit threats to reporters or their families. Journalists were also victims of doxxing, or the publication of personal information, such as a home address or phone number.  

Some journalists, who had been encouraged by their news organization to develop an online presence and promote their work, were angered by the lack of response from their employers to campaigns of systematic online harassment. But news organizations were not always sure what to do, other than monitoring social media in case the harassment became a threat in the real world. They had limited success engaging with social media companies or getting them to remove harassing posts. They were also vulnerable because, as institutions committed to free speech, they didn’t want to be seen as attempting to censor the voices of others. And the demands from the newsrooms were often impossible to reconcile. Journalists who had built their own brands online did not want managers telling them what they could or could not post. But they did want them to step in and defend them when things got out of hand.  

One thing news organizations could do was train their reporters on how to manage and mitigate online harassment. Many brought in outside experts, including trainers from Freedom of the Press Foundation and PEN America to offer workshops that covered strategies for reducing the personal information available online, documenting abuse, and blocking unwanted ​​content. News organizations also expanded resources for responding to stress and building resilience based on presentations and workshops from the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma at Columbia, including guidance for journalists and editors exposed to traumatic imagery.  

Their training emphasized that there were certain practical steps that journalists and news organizations could take — such as using an online service like DeleteMe to scrub personal information from the Internet. But they also needed to prepare themselves emotionally for the inevitable onslaught. 

In April 2019, Reich left BuzzFeed and joined The New York Times. (Today, he’s the vice president of safety and security for the organization.) He took ART School with him and kept the training running throughout the pandemic. In May 2020, following the murder of George Floyd by police officers in Minneapolis, street protests erupted across the country. Journalists seeking to cover them faced systematic attacks. In total, nearly 130 journalists were arrested or detained in 2020, and hundreds more were assaulted, 80% at the hands of law enforcement, according to the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker. Reporters of color were especially vulnerable in the streets, and they were also sometimes traumatized by the story they were covering, observing their own communities under siege. Then, following Biden’s election victory in November, came the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, in which journalists were targeted and assaulted by the crowd, and media equipment was destroyed.  

In October 2021, The New York Times hired Maria Salazar-Ferro as director of newsroom safety and resilience. “The job was created because of the protests and the election and how the environment for journalists in the U.S. changed,” Salazar-Ferro, a former colleague from CPJ, told me. The Times also invested in new personal protective equipment specifically tailored to protest coverage and brought on a news security manager Eric Jones, with a background in law enforcement. Jones occasionally accompanies reporters in the field. 

The national and politics desks now routinely use risk assessments, Salazar-Ferro said. The safety team has worked with reporters covering everything from hurricanes and floods, to protests and demonstrations, to sex clubs in Brooklyn and Black surfers in Queens. In preparation for the 2024 presidential election, the team has created an overarching risk assessment, looking at both the physical and online environments. Following the July 13 assassination attempt against former President Trump, the Times stepped up threat monitoring on behalf of dozens of reporters, editors, audio producers and support staff it deployed to the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. This included tracking online chatter. No serious threats were detected. The Times security team used the same process to prepare for the Democratic National Convention, which is taking place in Chicago this week. Street protests have already started.

Outside the U.S., The Times takes a different approach, said David McCraw, the top newsroom lawyer who oversees the four-person high-risk team that works with journalists and reporting teams covering conflict or operating in highly repressive environments. Decision-making is guided by security memos generated by the reporter and assessed by editors who evaluate risk relative to the value of the story. The Times requires reporters operating in a high-risk environment to undergo a HEFAT. Aside from the tactical training, the main benefit of such courses McCraw believes is “they focus the mind. We’re not playing games here. Bad things can happen.” 

At the same time, McCraw had continued to observe a melding of domestic and international threats, pointing to the doxxing of reporter Natalie Kitroeff by former Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador in February. After Kitroeff reported that U.S. law enforcement officials were investigating ties between key allies of the president and leaders of the drug cartels, López Obrador made public Kitroeff’s personal cell number during his morning press conference. “They’re learning from each other, the bad actors,” McCraw said.  

With the elections and Israel’s invasion of Gaza as the backdrop, Reich and I organized in November 2023 a Safety Summit at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY, where I direct the Journalism Protection Initiative. We invited top safety people from about a dozen leading U.S. news organizations. Our goal was two-fold. First, we wanted guidance on how safety should be taught to journalism students as part of our effort to develop a safety curriculum at the Newmark School. The second was to host a frank conversation among leading safety professionals about the state of the industry and current best practices. Following the summit, we distributed a survey to participants.  

The results confirmed that news organizations increasingly have a domestic focus in their safety training. Of the 12 news organizations that responded to the survey — which included magazines, news sites, and several broadcast networks — all but one offered some sort of training. About a third of them implemented training following the 2016 elections. Covering civil unrest and managing digital security were the most common training sessions offered. Only around half offered training on hostage survival. An increasing number of organizations now also offer training online, not just in person. One interesting finding is that there is no uniform structure for managing risk. Some news organizations have a specialized security expert on staff, while in others, the safety efforts were led by top editors or general counsels. In many instances, responsibility for safety was shared, generally between newsroom leaders and safety specialists. 

But in the broader landscape, there are alarming gaps. The demise of BuzzFeed News which shut down in April 2023 and VICE News, which effectively ceased operations in February, is a huge blow to safety, Salazar-Ferro told me. “They were such innovators and so good,” Salazar-Ferro said. “The best thing was how willing they were to share and how much they wanted to engage with everyone and to open their training to freelancers.” 

Outside of the major news organizations, there is little safety awareness or infrastructure at a time when many news organizations are cutting resources, particularly for support staff. Many local news organizations are simply unequipped to cover the violent protests in their communities, should they occur. A number of nonprofit organizations have stepped in to address the gaps, including Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, which has increased pro bono legal support for local media, and the International Women’s Media Foundation which has launched a program they are calling the News Safety Across America. Nadine Hoffman, who is directing that effort, told me that the IWMF involvement in safety training began about a decade ago focused on high-risk reporting and the particular challenges faced by female reporters.  

Over time, the program has evolved, and while they still offer HEFAT courses for journalists, they have also developed specialized training for U.S. reporters that is made available regardless of gender. To maximize the number of journalists reached, the IWMF has stripped the curriculum down to a single day, focused on basic safety skills like carrying out risk assessments. First aid has been eliminated. Courses have been conducted in a number of swing states, including Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin, Texas, and North Carolina. So far, they’ve trained more than 500 journalists.   

There are many strategies that can be employed in a low-resources environment, according to the safety experts I spoke with. For Reich, it’s all about fostering a safety culture, something newsroom leaders can do by creating processes and appropriate accountability. “If you can have a seminar, if you can have a meeting that lasts for two hours where you just did a risk assessment with all the right people in the room, that would get you somewhere,” Reich told me. Once you have a process to identify risk there are a wide range of resources available online for free from organizations ranging from CPJ, to RCFP, and the Freedom of the Press Foundation that can help with mitigation strategies, he said. 

Reinforcing the culture of safety is also Reich’s goal at The Times. “My work here has just been really thinking about implementation and operationalizing,” Reich told me. “That’s what I look at as my success.” In that effort, he has gained at least one important ally: Guy Trebay. Since completing ART School, Trebay says he has become a safety evangelist in the newsroom. “We’re in a different world,” Trebay told me. “These are skills everyone should have.”