Why we'd be broke without fixers
When foreign journalists work abroad, our secret weapon is the local journalist we work with. We call them fixers for good reason. Without them we’d be broke. We have them lined up, ready for action, right across the globe.
“Secret” weapon being the operative word, because these guys work behind the scenes, making stuff happen. The expectations we place on them are roughly of the same order as those the world is placing on Obama. And when fixers deliver, we make good telly.
Robert Chamwami, our fixer in Congo, deserves a special mention from me as our trip there in November was the second time I’ve worked with him. Both times I’ve won awards.
He didn’t manage to be that secret a presence though. If you look carefully at this report, you’ll see a Congolese man gently helping a crippled old lady along a rocky path (about 3mins 20 secs in).
That’s Chamwami. And here he is again, in the middle, with our driver on the far left and Ben de Pear and Stuart Webb on the right.
Fixers are all-too-often the unsung heros of our business. They work long hours in sometimes dangerous places. They take risks simply doing what they do. At times, they’re tainted by association with us and have to live with the consequences – long after the foreign journalists they’d been working with have gone.
At times, for example in Zimbabwe, they work with us undercover. If they’re caught, as one of my ITV colleagues pointed out during last night’s awards ceremony, there’s no friendly foreign embassy to bail them out. We pay our fixers well – but I’ve never met one who was only in it for the money.
The best bit is the bond of friendship forged by working under pressure in sometimes tense and difficult conditions. When you finally get the chance to flop, you get little glimpses of your fixer’s real life.
That’s how I learned that Khaled, my fixer in Gaza, was a dab hand in the kitchen; before I left Rafah, I extracted from Khaled his recipe for the best babaganoush I’d ever tasted. It was rather like convincing Colonel Sanders to tell you what was in his chicken.
Jonathan with Khaled, Stuart Webb (camera) and Inigo Gilmore (C4 News reporter) in Gaza
It’s how I became acquainted with the gypsy bars on the Danube in Belgrade, courtesy of Dragana our Serbian fixer and her spirited journalistic fraternity. It’s how, thanks to Amar, I discovered they keep hedgehogs as domestic pets in Darfur to eat the insects.
It how I ended up sharing tea and tiffins with Indian and Pakistani troops across Kashmir’s line of control as I watched in disbelief as Tahir, our Pakistani fixer held court, being interviewed by scores of Indian reporters.
And it’s also how I learned that Robert Chamwami, my friend the freelance journalist in Eastern Congo, had a penchant for sangria – a tipple that proved rather hard to find in Goma. Although not impossible.