Calling All Video Journalists
BY Stephen Talbot

Video journalist and former IRP Fellow Joe Rubin on assignment in Sri Lanka in 2002 for the very first broadcast of FRONTLINE/World.

We are pleased to announce that FRONTLINE/World has joined forces with the International Reporting Project (IRP) in Washington, D.C. to offer a Fall 2008 Fellowship for a video journalist to report an international story. Applications are now being accepted. The deadline is April 1.

You can find all the details and an online application form on the IRP Web site.

The International Reporting Project, based at Johns Hopkins University, is celebrating its 10-year anniversary of providing support for U.S. journalists to report overseas. The
upcoming IRP Fellowships will begin September 1 in Washington, D.C., and run through October 25, including a five-week period in which the Fellows will do their international reporting. IRP is offering up to four Fellowships, and one of these, cosponsored by FRONTLINE/World will be reserved for video journalists.

We are happy to formalize this relationship with IRP, because we have been cooperating since 2002 when our television series and Web site debuted. Our very first broadcast in May 2002 featured a story by an IRP Fellow (then known as Pew Fellows) Joe Rubin, who went to Sri Lanka to report a story we called, "Living with Terror," about suicide bombers on that troubled Indian Ocean island.

We followed that up in our very next episode with one of our signature stories, "Pol Pot's Shadow," reported in Cambodia by IRP/PEW Fellow Amanda Pike.

Since then, two other IRP Fellows have produced broadcast stories for FRONTLINE/World: Raney Aronson (now FRONTLINE's senior producer) in 2004 on sex workers and HIV/AIDS in India; and Jessie Deeter in 2005 on the United Nations peacekeepers in Liberia.

IRP Fellows Sarah Colt (Namibia), Kelly Whalen (Russia), Vanessa Hua (South Korea) and Matthew Ozug (Cambodia) have all contributed Rough Cut online videos to the FRONTLINE/World Web site, and last year IRP Fellow Ryan Anson produced a FlashPoint photo essay for us in the Philippines and Thailand.

I, too, have been a beneficiary of the IRP's commitment to encouraging more international reporting. In 2004, I went to Lebanon and Syria on an eye-opening, IRP-sponsored trip. It was one of their "Gatekeeper Editor" tours, and it led the following year to my producing a FRONTLINE/World report from Beirut and Damascus, "The Earthquake," with reporter Kate Seelye.

So we have had a long and productive relationship with IRP, and with this new, jointly sponsored Fellowship, we look forward to an even stronger partnership for Web site and broadcast stories.

For those of you interested in pursuing this Fellowship, take a look at some of our previous IRP videos (linked above), and then go to the IRP site to apply. Remember, the deadline is coming up soon: April 1.

Good luck!