The War on Journalists

With conflict continuing in Ukraine, and the death toll of journalists in Gaza reaching alarming proportions, we look at the role of journalists in war. Featuring Julian Borger, John Lyons, Alisa Sopova and Anastasia Taylor-Lind. Hosted by Hamish Macdonald.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

JULIAN BORGER
Julian Borger is The Guardian‘s World Affairs Editor, based in Washington. He covered the Balkan wars in the 1990s.  He also served as The Guardian‘s Middle East correspondent in Jerusalem and its Washington Bureau Chief. Julian was part of the Guardian team that won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for public service journalism for its coverage of the Snowden files on mass surveillance. I Seek A Kind Person is his second book. His first, The Butcher’s Trail, was published in 2016.

JOHN LYONS
John Lyons is one of Australia’s most experienced journalists and the Global Affairs Editor of the ABC. Previously he was Head of Investigative Journalism at the ABC, responsible for Four Corners, 7.30, Foreign Correspondent, Insiders, Australian Story, Q&A and the Investigative Reporting Team. For six years, John was The Australian’s Middle East correspondent, based in Jerusalem, an experience that led him to write the bestselling Balcony Over Jerusalem. He has interviewed everyone from former Israeli prime ministers Shimon Peres and Ehud Olmert to key figures from Hezbollah and Hamas. John has won many awards, including the Graham Perkin Australian Journalist of the Year Award, three Walkleys and UN awards. He now lives in Sydney.

ALISA SOPOVA
Alisa Sopova is a journalist and an anthropologist whose work focuses on civilian experiences of the war in Ukraine. Having experienced military violence first-hand, she has devoted her career to exploring storytelling as a means to convey the true-to-life experiences of daily life during the war. Alisa’s reporting from Ukraine has been featured in The New York Times, TIME Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, and NPR. She is a co-author and co-founder of the #5KFromTheFrontline project.

ANASTASIA TAYLOR-LIND
Anastasia Taylor-Lind is a British/Swedish photojournalist and a poet. For the past decade Anastasia has collaborated with Alisa Sopova, a journalist and an anthropologist from the city of Donetsk in eastern Ukraine. In 2023, she received the Canon Female Photojournalist Award for her long-term reporting from eastern Ukraine. Anastasia is a National Geographic Society Explorer, TED Fellow, and 2016 Nieman Fellow at Harvard university. Her first book Maidan – Portraits from the Black Square, about the 2014 revolution in Ukraine, was published the same year. Her debut poetry collection One Language was published by Smith|Doorstop in 2022.

ABOUT THE HOST

HAMISH MACDONALD
Hamish Macdonald is an award-winning journalist who has covered wars, disasters, and major world events, in Australia and the UK working for the American network ABC News, the UK’s Chanel 4 News and Al Jazeera English, and Network Ten and the ABC in Australia. He has delivered ground-breaking news reports from Egypt, Indonesia, Japan, Afghanistan, and Libya, fronted investigative documentary specials, and hosted or co-hosted television programs and specials. He was Young Journalist of the Year in Britain in 2008, and anchored Al Jazeera’s International Emmy-nominated coverage of the Georgia-Russia war from Tbilisi. Hamish has studied Arabic in Yemen and Indonesian in Jakarta. He is co-host with Geraldine Doogue of Global Roaming, a weekly radio program on ABC Radio National on foreign policy issues.