>> Meet the Journalists of BREAKING NEWS

“We leave the Rosebud [River] tomorrow, and by the time this reaches you, we will have met and fought the red devils, with what result remains to be seen. I go with Custer and will be at the death.”
— Mark Kellog, last dispatch before
the battle at Little Bighorn, from War I chapter
     
  “David Winslow, a reporter with AP’s Broadcast News Center in Washington, was sitting in his tenth-floor apartment, looking out at the capital, when he ‘saw a “jumbo” tail go by me along Route 395…I just saw the tail go whoosh right past me. In a split second, you heard this boom. A combination of a crack and a thud. It rattled my windows. I thought they were going to blow out.’ For the next five hours, he stayed by his window, broadcasting to the world.”
   
— on 9/11, from Disasters chapter
     
“When [Mohandas K. Gandhi] was arrested in January 1932, [AP correspondent James A.] Mills was with him. Gandhi turned to Mills and said, ‘It may be that I shall die in prison. It may be I shall never see you again. Therefore, I want to thank you and The Associated Press for the thorough and impartial way in which you have always reported my activities and the progress of the Indian Nationalist movement.”
   
— from Foreign Correspondents chapter
     
  “’During the terrible torture, sweat ran down my face, and my hands were trembling so much I couldn’t change the film,’…’When the bayoneting started, Michel [Laurent] was just as pale as the victims. It went on and on. The crowd cheered and took no notice of us. I hoped the men would die quickly, but it took almost an hour. Then the mob came in to finish the execution with their tramping feet. I hope and pray that no AP man has to see such terror again.”
   
— Horst Faas on the execution of four men in Dacca, Bangladesh in 1971, from Photographs chapter
     
“Computers were just being introduced into newsrooms, and two of the hulking machines had recently been installed in San Francisco. ‘We dedicated one of the computers to the Hearst story,’ recalled Martin Thompson, then the news editor in that bureau. ‘Those first terminals each had their own memory boxes. There was no central database. We kept the Hearst story on a screen, updating it continuously with each new fact. To be safe, we made printouts because a spark of static electricity could make a story vanish. That went on for 12 hours, until a local broadcaster and newspaper decided they would go with the story, removing any reason to hold back.’”
   
— from Trials chapter
     
  “I swam across the Mekong River, shared dog meat with hill tribesmen, and, being a great lover of elephants, took a course in how to ride the beasts and then played in an elephant polo match. Sadly, for me, I also charted the said despoiling of once magic places like Luang Prabang, Phnom Penh, and Chiang Mai by the forces of rampant tourism and Westernization.”
— Dennis Gray, from Foreign Correspondents chapter
 



 

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