Reporting From The World’s Front Lines, With Jane Ferguson

It takes extraordinary courage to be on the world’s front lines, reporting on events that are often hard to look at: war, uprisings, crises, and insurgencies. Day and night, journalists have to fight to get their – and our – questions answered. They have to contend not only with the challenges of their physical environments but also pushing for facts and the truth. In this episode, J.R. Lowry sits with a remarkable guest who has been reporting from the world’s front lines, Jane Ferguson, who is a special correspondent for PBS NewsHour, a contributor to The New Yorker, and a former journalist for CNN and Al Jazeera. Jane takes us along her journey from growing up at a time of instability in Northern Ireland and how that influenced her to pursue a career in journalism. She also talks about some of the stories she’s covered that have taken her from Sudan to Somalia to Yemen to Abu Dhabi and more, bootstrapping her way into very difficult places as a young journalist and covering undercover stories far from the competition. Join Jane as she tells us her incredible experiences of navigating the turmoil of the world, all for the drive to deliver the stories that need to be shared.

Check out the full series of “Career Sessions, Career Lessons” podcasts here or visit pathwise.io/podcast/. A full written transcript of this episode is also available at https://pathwise.io/podcasts/reporting-from-the-worlds-front-lines-with-jane-ferguson

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Reporting From The World’s Front Lines, With Jane Ferguson

Special Correspondent For PBS NewsHour And Former CNN / Al Jazeera Journalist

I am both excited and a little bit nervous because my guest is an actual professional journalist. Jane Ferguson is a special correspondent for PBS NewsHour, a contributor to The New Yorker, and the author of the upcoming book, No Ordinary Assignment, which will be released in July 2023. Her prior experience includes time at CNN and Al Jazeera. Her reporting on war, uprisings, humanitarian crises, and other geopolitical events has taken her all over the world, including to Afghanistan, Brazil, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, the UAE, Ukraine, and Yemen among others.

Jane was born in Northern Ireland and briefly studied in the US before going to England to study English Literature and Politics at the University of York. Her unique and fearless style of journalism has earned her a number of industry awards, including an Emmy, a George Polk Award, an Alfred I. duPont Columbia University Award, an Aurora Award for Humanitarian Reporting, a Peabody Award, an Overseas Press Club of America Peter Jennings Award, and a Gracie Award. Jane has previously been based in Abu Dhabi, Beirut, and Kabul. She lives and works in New York.

Jane, welcome. Thank you for agreeing to do this show. I appreciate it.

I’m excited to be here.

I am an amateur podcast host, and you are a massively talented professional journalist. I’m not sure which one of us would be more worried about how this is going to go.

I’m not a podcast producer myself, but I can talk.

Let’s dive in. When did you first decide that you wanted to be a journalist, and how did you decide to take the path of reporting from some of the most challenging places in the world?

I knew very young as a child that I wanted to be a journalist. I couldn’t point to exactly one specific incident, but I did grow up watching and reading the news. I’m a classic example of someone who grew up in a small town, in fact, a rural area. I was outside of a small town. I would’ve aspired to live in a town. I grew up in the middle of nowhere on a small farm. The rest of the world had such allure to me. I had massive wanderlust from a young age.

I grew up where newspapers were big in our house, as was the evening news. I knew I wanted to travel. I was rather obsessed as a youngster with stories of adventurers and travel writers, especially female writers and travel writers like Dame Freya Stark, or Gertrude Bell who worked as a diplomat. I knew I wanted to work internationally.

I was also exposed to the BBC a lot as a kid. That was the voice of the world. The BBC was one place where there were a lot of women on air traveling around the world. I had role models to look to in the evening news. There weren’t a ton of female professional role models growing up in rural Northern Ireland, so that was one area where I saw women traveling. It interested me that they were able to travel around the world and talk to newsmakers, leaders, and regular people.

Another thing that shaped me, in retrospect, is the fact that I did grow up in Northern Ireland. I grew up in the very last Protestant village before you get to South Armagh. The wild IRA heartlands in the ‘80s and the ‘90s when I was growing up, it was a time of extraordinary instability, but when you’re a child, everything seems fairly normal. I started to grow up and realize that there were a lot of questions I asked that weren’t being answered about sectarianism, checkpoints that we had to travel through, and bombs going off. It’s no coincidence that I spent a lot of my career embedding with, studying, and reporting on insurgencies.

Jane Ferguson on growing up in rural Northern Ireland: It was a time of extraordinary instability, but when you’re a child, everything seems fairly normal. As I started to grow up, I realized that there were a lot of questions I asked that weren’t being answered.

As a little girl, it seemed strange to me that I couldn’t quite understand how otherwise peaceful people, whether they were farmers, bakers, or taxi drivers, could be inspired to act with great violence. It was something that became fascinating for me as a little girl, perhaps subconsciously, and I ended up traveling around the world trying to answer some of those questions.

You started in Abu Dhabi with CNN, right?

In Dubai. I got a job at a newspaper. I was a business journalist for a little while. It was the first paying job I could find in journalism at an English-language newspaper in Dubai. CNN opened a big hub, like a huge office, in Abu Dhabi, which had a studio and its own show. I got in my car, drove up there, and did everything I could to persuade them to give me a job. They gave me a freelance contract in the end.

You were already there. I was wondering how you decided to start there of all places coming from Northern Ireland and having gone to university in England.

I got there via Yemen. I went to university in England, and then after university, it was hard to find work. It was my year at college that we were struggling so badly [due to the financial crisis]. My best friend from college is the West Africa Bureau Chief for the New York Times, but [back then] Ruth was the editor-in-chief of the student newspaper. We won all the awards, like the Guardian Award every year for the Best Student Newspaper. I was a news editor and writer for a while there. We all presumed we would end up working on the broadsheets.

I knew I wanted to work in broadcasting. I always dreamed of working at the BBC, but the financial crisis hit right at the time when the fall of advertising and the rise of the internet were damaging the industry. We all ended up scrambling to try to find somewhere to go. I tried to find work. I went to Yemen to study Arabic. I’d started studying Arabic in college and taking classes because I knew it would be helpful for my career. This was in 2007 and 2008.

The Middle East had fascinated me my whole life. That was where much of the foreign news was, coming out of Iraq and the wider region. I went to Yemen to study Arabic, and then when I ran out of money, I needed to get a job. The only jobs going at that time were in Dubai because Dubai had not yet been impacted by the financial crisis. That’s how I made my way there. I’d always intended to live in the Middle East. That was the path I ended up taking.

You mentioned Yemen. One of your first big stories was about the Houthi rebel incursion from Yemen into Saudi Arabia and the Saudi Arabians’ response. You were reporting that from within Yemen at the time.

I’ve been reporting on the Houthis’ insurgency since long before it became a global story. It was late 2009 when the Houthis were rising. They had been having periodic uprisings against the Saleh government for quite some time, but this was the latest iteration. In 2009, it was the first time they incurred into Saudi territory. The Saudis were sending fighter jets across into Yemeni territory.

It was becoming more of a regional war, but it was still hidden away in the north. That was my first ever television piece. It was to drive up there towards the frontline, talk to witnesses who had fled their villages, and gain footage from Houthi rebels of some of the fighting as well. I sold that story to CNN. That’s how I got started there.

Nine years later, I ended up back in Yemen, and within those nine years, massive amounts of history happened. There was a revolution. The Arab Spring made it to Yemen. Ali Abdullah Saleh, the dictator, had been pushed from power. The Houthis had swept down from their homelands in the Northern mountains into the capital city, taking over the entire north of the country. The Saudis had launched a Saudi-led coalition to try to oust them. That included a massive blockade of all Houthi-controlled areas, which is where 80% of Yemenis live. That blockade included journalists, so it was hard to get in. It took a lot of planning.

You were working as a freelancer. Were you doing these assignments on your own? Did you have a crew with you of any form? Did you have any [security] or any other kind of support?

In the very early days, it was all non-commissioned. I would have conversations with the boss at CNN who had become a friend and mentor to me, but he wasn’t in a position to commission work. That’s when a news organization takes ownership of you. We’re talking about insurance and liability. I was going completely by myself. I would either hire a local cameraman or I would often film my own work.

I spent a lot of time covering the conflict in Mogadishu, which was very much still undercovered. It was the fact that there was another battle for Mogadishu to push Al-Shabaab, the main militants of Somalia, out of the capital city in 2010. I would be covering stories like that and small Al-Qaeda offshoots in Yemen, Sudan, and Sahel. I covered those mostly by filming by myself. It was one-man banding. Those were the very early days of my career. From the end of 2011 onwards, everything was commissioned when I started progressing in my career. It’s been a long time since I’ve rolled up somewhere on my own dime, but that’s how I had to get started.

It’s bootstrapping in general, and you were doing it in some very difficult places to have worked.

My colleagues and I did that in the early days of 2008, 2009, and 2010. Before the Arab Spring, we were part of a new wave of young foreign correspondents who were freelancers whom the networks, the newspapers, and the broadsheets were using. After the financial crisis, it became more common. Places had hiring freezes in place for a long time. Many young people who couldn’t get in moved to Beirut, Cairo, Amman, and Damascus and started freelancing. There was a bit of a pushback against that. The war in Syria started to turn the tide because many were getting kidnapped and killed. In a couple of years running up to that, it was becoming more common. We were the first young journalists to go out doing enterprise reporting by ourselves.

When you were in those early days and you were in Sudan, Somalia, and Yemen, how much time were you spending on the ground there versus back in Abu Dhabi?

I spent much more time at the home base than on the road. It was mostly not by choice, but by expenses. You’re effectively trying to stretch [your funding] and stay as long as you possibly can, but you’re also paying for drivers and hotel rooms. I would get insurance per day, which would be MedEvac insurance that you can organize through various organizations. All of it was very expensive for a freelancer. I was on the road probably 10 days every 2 months. It does take weeks to plan your trip because you’re planning access to something important. You spend a lot more time at home doing edits afterward, post-production or pre-production, and setting everything up.

CNN would support you in terms of facilities to do that part of the work.

They did that for the edits. If I came home from side Sudan and they wanted a story, then yes. They would assign an editor to me and support getting the raw footage to the final product and getting it on air. That would be whenever they would come in.

You were an entrepreneur.

Effectively, you’re running yourself as a self-employed person whenever you’re doing that. I was registered. Dubai was a good place to be because you could register as a professional entity with the media city, as they call it, which are these free zones. There are tax breaks. You can access various facilities that are helpful for small businesses. [Living in Dubai], I could fly anywhere in the world within nine hours. It was pretty incredible, working as a small business.

You’re hiring cameramen, camera crews, or whatever. You’re paying them out of pocket, taking all the risk in that, and hoping that you can sell the story.

You’re trying to figure out your vendors, whom you’re working with, what their budgets are, and how long you can afford to stay somewhere. There is a risk. If you don’t get the story, you don’t get paid. There’s a financial risk to what you’re doing as well.

How did you choose the particular angles that you reported on?

My angles in those early days were very much so leaning into under-covered stories. Part of that was my own curiosity. I was fascinated by stories that weren’t being covered, but a lot of it was also a necessity. I was a [young reporter] who didn’t have a reputation, a host of awards, and a well-known name in journalism.

The cable networks were always sending their own star staff correspondents to places like Baghdad and Kabul. I learned very quickly that if you go to the big giant stories, you’re much less likely to find work because there’s no need there for you. The competition is too vast. I started covering under-covered stories. As a result, it ended up being something that I was so fascinated by anyway. That had more meaning to me. I was going to places like Somalia and covering conflicts in Somalia, South Sudan, and Yemen, which, at the time, were conflicts that nobody was covering. It interested me.

I was also interested from a regional perspective in what was happening geopolitically. It fascinated me to cover the small Al-Qaeda offshoots. As Al-Qaeda was coming under massive pressure in Iraq and Afghanistan, they were trying very much to franchise in places like Yemen, Somalia, and the African Sahel. Whether or not they were going to be successful at that would have huge implications for US foreign policy and national security. That also interested me.

You moved over to Al Jazeera after a few years. What prompted that move?

Part of it was logistics. I had a boss at CNN who had been giving me a contract and was buying a lot of my work. He ended up moving over to Al Jazeera. The context at the time in the industry was the Arab Spring. It was the end of 2011. Hosni Mubarak had been removed from power in Egypt. The whole world watched. The whole world hadn’t sat and watched a story from the Middle East like that in decades. I was intoxicated by the Arab Spring because I’d spent, by that stage, plenty of time in the Middle East getting to understand the young populations, the geopolitics, and the changing demographics. There was a sense of hope.

At the time, Al Jazeera English was far and above well beyond everybody else’s coverage of many of these revolutions. Everybody aspired to work for them. I remember at the time getting colleagues from CNN calling me saying, “How do we get in? Is there anything open at Al Jazeera?” It was because Al Jazeera English at the time was considered so cutting-edge, bold, and brave that it was an exciting place to be. There was plenty of competition to work there. It wasn’t like I wandered in the door. I had to find a story, as do most freelancers, that they couldn’t get.

I ended up going to Somalia again, but this time to South Somalia. I worked with a journalist from the New York Times to get access to a specific warlord. I happened to know that Al Jazeera had tried for him and failed to get an interview with him. I used that as a way in the door. He was the most prolific warlord in the South. He had changed sides from fighting with the Islamic Courts group to fighting with the Kenyans against Al-Shabaab. It was an interesting story. They were interested. They took the story. They were happy with me on air. I also had to back it up by getting other access that they couldn’t get. They were struggling to get access to Yemen before the Yemeni Dictator, Ali Abdullah Saleh, had fallen.

The Arab Spring was already in full momentum but hadn’t succeeded yet. I had a way of getting visas and getting into Yemen. Being able to get into Yemen, they then said, “We will fully commission you.” That’s when I became for them this firefighting young and scrappy reporter who they would throw into some of the more dangerous stories as the Arab Spring became much more volatile and more violent. They started using me in Yemen. They started using me as the first correspondent for them to send into Syria when it started becoming a war. That was how I got started there.

Let’s go back to the warlord interview for a minute. How much of it is what you see in the Hollywood version of it where you get blindfolded, shrouded, taken to some unknown place, and all of that?

It was a relatively dramatic crossing over from Kenya. You drive north. The Kenya-Somali border is not a particularly stable or safe place to be, so that was pretty fascinating. We get to the literal border. It is a little shack by the side of a wooden fence with some Kenyan soldiers in it who look pretty nervous because that’s a rough spot to have to guard with an AK-47.

We wander up with our passports and they’re pretty astounded. We are in the middle of nowhere. There’s no tarmac road. There is dirt and dust everywhere. It is very desert-y up there. You drive past what was at the time the biggest refugee camp in the world called Dadaab, which is where many Somalis had fled over the border into Kenya. You drive far beyond that. You’re in the bush or in a desert with some scrub. You get to the little shack.

We were coordinating with a fixer who was coordinating with the warlord’s militia. They’re called the Raskamboni Movement. They said they were waiting for us there. When we get to the border, we can see them at a very far distance in a 4×4 car. The Kenyans look at us like we’re crazy and they stamp our passports in this little tin shack. We then put our hands in the air and walk across the border. We walk across the red sand. The Kenyans then duck back into their shed.

The fighters drive towards us, jump out of the vehicle all with guns, and welcome us into the vehicle. It’s one of those moments in your career, and it happens again and again, where you simply have to trust your contacts. You have to put yourself in an unbelievably vulnerable place because you have to trust that your connections are solid.

Jane Ferguson on traveling to an interview with a Somali warlord: It’s one of those moments in your career where you simply have to trust your contacts. You have to put yourself in an unbelievably vulnerable place because you have to trust that your connections are solid.

You get ushered into the car by some of this warlord’s fighters. You’re taken to meet with the warlord himself. What was it like interviewing him? Was he a personable guy? Was he hard-edged?

He was very hard-edged. There was an awful lot of sitting around. You get offered an interview, but you spend 98% of your time with their fighters at their camp. You drive about another half an hour into Somalia, and then they have a camp there. This was in 2011. At the time, the famine was starting to bite in Somalia. There were also truckloads of destitute civilians headed south trying to make it to those refugee camps in Kenya to cross over the border.

We were with these fighters. It was extremely uncomfortable for me. I was very young. I was uncomfortable because these were fighters who, for most of their career, had worked with Islamist armed groups. Some of them are linked to Al-Qaeda. They were confused why the boss was inviting in these two infidels. Some of them were friendly, and some of them decidedly not. It was also the last day of Ramadan, the holy month for Islam. They’d been fasting for a month, so they were a little bit hangry. I was very nervous around them. There was a lot of waiting around.

Eventually, he gave us an interview. Often, these interviews are a little bit stilted by the fact that there is a translator. He was less charismatic than I expected him to be. He was less media trained. He had not done a lot of media, certainly not English language media. He had a message, which was, “Back me and I will get rid of Al-Shabaab.” He was trying to take back his big money spinner, which was the massive Kismayo port. It was the main port city in the South of Somalia, which he had controlled.

He was a cynical operator who knew to side with the Kenyans at the right time. This was a power play for him. He had his own line. He didn’t like it when I brought up the word warlord. He pushed back against that a lot. There’s always a little dance. You can’t allow yourself to be intimidated, but at the same time, you also have to be careful if someone decides that you’re more valuable as a kidnap victim than you are as someone who’s telling a story that they want to be a part of. That’s a dance that you have to somehow assess. I interviewed him in a straw hut. He was relatively impatient. I was relatively inexperienced. At this stage, I was 26 and I was filming by myself. I was doing my best.

You were later back in Yemen having to report anonymously by voice only because Al Jazeera had been banned from reporting inside the country. That must have been an interesting experience as well.

That was my first commissioned trip with Al Jazeera where they sent me in. They knew I would probably either get arrested, kicked out, or both if I showed up and said, “I’m Al Jazeera.” Some of my connections in Yemen had presumed I was still going to try to sell stories to CNN. They called me, “Our correspondent who we’re not naming for security reasons.” That’s how the anchor would introduce me. It was ridiculous.

Everybody knew who it was.

I would be quietly editing pieces in my hotel room at night and voicing over them under my bedsheets. There would be the local political security cops in plain clothes and intelligence guys in the hotel lobby and I’d be off to a protest. There were government workers who could see the writing on the wall but didn’t want to lose their jobs. They were dancing around me and I was dancing around them. It was a very funny reality. I got an email from a friend in Afghanistan who said, “That’s so funny. I’ve been watching Al Jazeera and I wonder exactly how many women from Northern Ireland are in Yemen. It’s a mystery. Who could it be?” It was pretty funny.

I have to imagine the conversations with family back home must have been uncomfortable in their own way. They must have been thinking, “Why did you choose to do this as a career?”

Yes and no. My family was very keen for me to succeed at what I wanted to do. I know other journalists experience this. Not everybody has a vast knowledge of what’s going on around the world in a minutiae way in terms of what’s dangerous and what’s not. Sometimes, ignorance is bliss. If you say to someone, “I’m going to South Sudan,” they’ve no idea that South Sudan is extraordinarily dangerous. Whereas if you say, “I’m off to Afghanistan,” they’ll panic and be very nervous. At the time, not a lot of people knew much about Somalia. They knew about Black Hawk Down and that that was bad. In the British psyche, it was less terrifying than in the American one.

You were in Syria not long after that and were smuggled into the country.

That’s right. I’m not sure if any of your audience will remember. There was a very important moment in not just the Syrian Civil War or Syrian uprising, but also the Arab Spring generally. Syria was turning from a series of protests in 2011 into an armed insurrection in 2012. Perhaps your audience remembers when the journalist Marie Colvin was killed in Homs, which was in February of 2012. At the end of January 2012, I was smuggled across the border from Lebanon into Syria, and into Homs City, which was the cradle of the insurrection where it was beginning. They were starting to take neighborhoods, try to control them, and hold off the regime. It was the genesis of war in Syria.

They were trying to persuade more units of the Syrian armed forces to defect to their side. At the time, that’s how anybody was getting in. There were these activists or citizen journalists who had set up their own media hub in Homs in a neighborhood called Baba Amr. They were the ones who were filming everything and putting it on YouTube. Many of them spoke English. They were going on the BBC. They were going on CNN. They were desperate to get the word out because so much of the Arab Spring became about communication. It became about getting the word out that this is what’s happening.

It’s a psychological thing when you’re rising up against a dictator. You’re relying on the masses rising up. You can’t be an insurrection of 50 people. You have to be 50,000 people. That was their tactic. As part of that, they wanted to bring journalists in to show them what was happening. I got to Beirut. I went back to filming by myself because it was so much easier to smuggle in just one person.

How did you get smuggled in?

I was flown to Beirut and then I was told to wait for contacts to come and connect with me. I had a meeting with them in the neighborhood of Hamra, West Beirut in a café where we discussed [the plan]. These guys gave me names that probably weren’t real. They said that they would drive me to the border, but I had to wait in my hotel until they were ready. That’s what I did.

I got a call from them the next day. They showed up in an SUV. We spent several days making it in because we were driving country roads and staying in safe houses. In the middle of the night, as the dawn light was coming out, I crossed over on foot with them across a field and climbed under a fence. On the other side of the fence, some Free Syrian Army, as they were called at the time, rebels picked me up and put me in a car. I said goodbye to my guys who had transported me, and then I was in Syria. I was handed from one group to another several times until I got to the transit point to get into the city of Homs.

It sounds like once you were there, they wanted the media’s attention. You were, relatively speaking, welcomed even though you’d been smuggled into the country.

I was welcomed because they wanted me there, but also, when I’m moving around, going to a field hospital, going to visit someone in their home, or going to the front line where there are rebels, I’m with those activists guys. I’m vouched for. As far as they’re concerned, I’m welcome because I’m with them. That’s so much of war reporting. It’s making sure that you have an in and people know who you are.

You talked earlier about Arab Spring being a time when the whole of the world was, for the first time in a long time, focused on a story in the Middle East. What stands out most for you from that time in terms of the reporting that you were doing?

It was such a huge moment of hope. Wherever you were watching the protests, what we wanted to communicate to the wider world was that this was young people. Everyone’s inspired by the uprisings and protests in Iran. They can see that they’re young. What struck me was that at the time, it was even more so across the Arab world, an entire generation of young people because the population or the sizes of families were huge. You’ve got countries where the vast majority of the country was under 25 years old.

What struck me was talking to young people who genuinely believed and understood that they deserved more than the corruption that stopped them from being able to get a job when they got out of college. A huge amount of it was the ability to have dignified lives. Much of it was sold in the American press was that they wanted democracy. That was not entirely accurate. It was not a clear reflection of what people wanted.

I would talk to young people who wanted the state to get off their backs. They wanted to be able to make a living. The young lad who started all of this in Tunisia had been humiliated because he was trying to sell fruit. Some corrupt cop came up and said, “You can’t do that.” He said, “How am I supposed to make a living?” Those were the last words he said before he self-immolated and began the entire thing.

For me, it was standing in the streets talking to young lads and young women who were 20, 22, and 23 who said, “We have no future here because the economic model doesn’t work. The political model doesn’t work. The social model, ethnic model, sectarian model, none of this works for us. We want better lives. We don’t necessarily want to live in complete emulation of the West, but we want a better system.”

Looking back, it’s always made me sad that those demands were effectively the best way for them to describe what dignity is like for them. They could see their lives. They could look at the stretch ahead of them and see that the rot…in the governments in the Arab world was going to rob them of a decent life.

It’s [about] dignity. Ultimately, they wanted to have something of a life, not necessarily the way that we think about it in the West, but something that allowed them to get by day-to-day.

There are all sorts of implications that we don’t even think of. For instance, in the Arab world, especially in places like Egypt and more patriarchal societies, if you’re a young man and you’re unmarried, you’re not considered a man. You need money to be able to afford to get married. You can’t get married if you can’t provide a home. Many young men felt emasculated.

Yemen, for instance, was a place where you had this unbelievably well-educated population in the cities. Yemen has been an intellectual hub for hundreds of years, but here, you had young lads and young women with Master’s degrees who couldn’t get a job waiting tables. You had expectations that these young people would pour out of college, and then they would hit reality. The reality would be corruption, poverty, and a whole lot of utter dysfunction.

It’s like slamming into a brick wall almost.

Al Jazeera sent you over to Afghanistan somewhere around that time as well. You were reporting from Kabul for a period.

That’s right. After Syria, a fair bit afterward, I ended up in Afghanistan as their Afghanistan correspondent. It was the first time in my career I had a beat where I could live there. I had an apartment in Dubai, but I was in and out. I would do 6 weeks in Afghanistan and 2 weeks out. I was there from the spring of 2013 through to 2014. That was somewhere that meant a lot to me. I was able to work with the same team. We had an incredible bureau of Afghan staff.

It was this important moment in history in Afghanistan. Most of the networks had pulled their people out and wound down bureaus to save money because people were not following the war in Afghanistan. This was another attempt by the Obama administration to draw down the war. There was a declaration of handing over the war to the Afghan forces. NATO completely stepped back into a training role.

What I ended up covering that year was the attempt by the Afghan security forces to take on the fight themselves. It was massively prescient seeing them struggling and relying on US Special Forces, and it was not often reported that they needed US Special Forces. They needed reconnaissance, surveillance, and intelligence support. They couldn’t do that by themselves.

In turn, we also saw the Taliban starting to stand and fight. The Taliban for 13 or 14 years years, had largely been an insurgency fighting with insurgency tactics against a much mightier enemy, the US Military. They would hit them, and then they would disappear. They would melt away into the villages. As the Afghan security forces were taking on the fight, the Taliban were increasingly standing, fighting, and engaging them. That was something we were trying to cover.

In addition to this, the big story in Afghanistan was the run-up to the 2014 elections. It was the first-ever Democratic transition in Afghanistan’s history as Hamid Karzai came to the end of his final term. In the end, Ashraf Ghani won the election. We traveled around the country and interviewed every candidate. That was an incredible experience for me, going to political rallies. We would go to a rally for Dostum who ended up becoming the vice president. He was known as a killer and was wanted for war crimes. We would go to his political rallies. They would be these huge, massive rallies in the countryside filled with many men on horseback. It was wild, I must admit.

One thing that was very helpful about working for Al Jazeera was that they had much looser rules around security than many of the other networks. It was for better and for worse, but to 28-year-old me, it was for better. I was able to go off around the countryside without needing armored vehicles and private security. I went off with my team. I had incredible freedom to travel and work in the way that many of my colleagues at US and British networks didn’t.

You did have a near-death experience, though, if have read correctly, because of a takeover of a hotel by the Taliban.

Yes. The Taliban were, at the time, doing what the military called Complex Attacks against Compounds, whether they were guest houses, offices of NGOs, the United Nations, or hotels. I was in the main hotel in Kabul. I had been moved away from a guest house because they were afraid of an attack. I was moved to a hotel that they considered more secure, but unfortunately, the Taliban were able to access the hotel. They got into the hotel. This was in March 2014, the big attack on the Serena Hotel. I was in my room at the time when they got in. There were intense gun battles. I was very lucky that I was in my room.

It was Nowruz, the Persian New Year, which is what they celebrate in Afghanistan. Many people were in the dining room. It was a very special night. It was packed. I was living and working there. I was eating alone, so I figured I’d go to my hotel room and order room service. Shortly after I ordered room service, I started hearing bangs in the hallway and shouts. It became clear that those bangs were gunshots. It was the first time the Taliban had ever managed to get inside the hotel. They’d attacked it many times, but they’d never been able to get inside. It was pure luck. Some of the Afghan Special Forces came, got me out of my hotel room, and managed to get me out of the building.

Was that the first time you had that kind of experience, a literal life-or-death moment?

No. It would’ve been about the second. Those of us who have done risky work would make a clear distinction between feeling scared and doing something quite dangerous, which was relatively regular at that time in my life, as opposed to moments where you think, “I might not make it out of this. Death is pretty close.” Luckily, those moments are extremely rare and should be because they’re a time when you realize that maybe you’ve pushed your luck. Getting out of Syria felt that way to me, trying to drive through regime checkpoints and being stopped by armed men at the border just meters away from freedom. I didn’t know who they were, but I had presumed they were regime intelligence guys. That was a bad time for me.

Jane Ferguson on reporting from the world’s hot spots: Those of us who have done really risky work would make a clear distinction between feeling scared and doing something quite dangerous.

Also, in Kabul, when the hotel got attacked, that did have a big impact on me. My window wouldn’t open. It was one of those windows that would only open a little bit, maybe 7 or 8 inches. It was double-glazed, so I knew I couldn’t smash the window. For a long time afterward, I would test windows in hotels. I would walk around the grounds. I was hyper-vigilant in hotels for a long time about escape routes. That was unpleasant. I was lucky.

Given everything that you’ve seen over your years of reporting, the wars, the insurgencies, the uprisings, and the humanitarian crises, how do you not let that get inside of you, or does it?

It does get inside of you. You feel incredible sadness sometimes. It can feel particularly hard when you watch a country that you love descend into the chaos that war brings, which takes generations to recover from. Watching Yemen decline from when I was a youngster at a college studying Arabic is sad to see. It’s sad to see young people feel that there’s no future in that country for them anymore and that they need to leave. In many ways, that has been the saddest thing on a big scale. There is a horrible death, loss, and grief at the moment, but whenever you also think about the scale of things, that is what knocks me off my feet sometimes.

The fall of Kabul was particularly hard for me to get over. I don’t think I’ll ever get over that. The idea that there’s no future there for an entire generation of young women is unbelievable. I sometimes struggle to grasp things that make me very sad. One thing I would say, though, is that when we’re reporting, there is a sense of people seeing what comes through our literal lens.

Often, because of the nature of us needing to tell these stories of people, there can be a misperception that it’s pure misery all the time. The truth is that I don’t think misery is a sustainable state for human beings. We often forget that on the road, there are many moments of levity and normalcy, and I say that with caution. People in refugee camps fall in love and get married. People tell dirty jokes at the front lines. People share cigarettes and cups of coffee and they manage. It’s hard to describe exactly how adaptable the human spirit is and how people manage it. I see an unbelievable amount of resilience.

A lot of people think that I film violence, but I don’t. I film courage. That’s effectively what I capture everywhere I go. I see vast amounts of grit and courage as well. The human cruelty that I get to see is horrifying. I also see volunteer medics, volunteer fighters, protestors, and young people. I see more people trying to do good than evil.

I know you went over to PBS. You’ve done some writing for The New Yorker. You’ve finished drafting your book. What does the mix look ahead for you now that you’re based in New York and working from the US?

I jumped over not too long after the attack in Kabul. I started working the next year for PBS, and I’ve been there ever since. I’ve had unbelievable years of PBS reporting from all over. That has been the main maturation of my career, covering stories for PBS. I moved to New York in 2020. I probably was the only human being moving to New York in 2020, but it was planned.

Before COVID, I had been invited to teach at Princeton as a guest professor for one semester. I’d been planning to move over. I’d been living in the Middle East my whole life after college, so I was ready to move and be a bit closer to the home base of most of the broadcasters. I started writing for The New Yorker. When I moved here, COVID got in the way a little bit, but not too much.

I was still able to travel and work, but I took most of 2022 off to write my book after covering the fall of Kabul. I had to come back from book leave for a short while to go to Ukraine shortly after that war broke out, but generally speaking, I have been traveling vastly less because of writing. It is an incredibly intense, challenging, but very rewarding experience. I love to write, so I relished taking the time out.

My book is finished. I’ve finished the line edits and sent it off to the publishers. It’s going to be in stores in July 2023. 2023 is very much so going to be about getting back out on the road, and then a ton of book promotion, which will be a big new experience for me, traveling around. I’m looking forward to that over the spring and summer.

What are the stories that you want to be covering as you look ahead into 2023, as much as you can predict where the stories will be?

If you could wave a magic wand and get me anywhere in the world, it would be Iran. The protest movement there and what’s happening there is not only inspiring and important, but it is the implications of the fall of the Iranian regime across the globe, not just the Middle East and the region, and what it means. I lived in Beirut for six years. What would this mean for Hezbollah? What would this mean for Israel? What would this mean for Yemen and the Houthis? This could be one of the biggest stories in the Middle East since the invasion of Iraq. It is perhaps even bigger.

On a personal level, the inspiring young women who are risking their lives there deserve to be on air. I would love to be able to go in, but it’s not possible. I’m watching closely what’s happening in Israel with the new Israeli government. We’ve already had massively increased violence in the occupied West Bank, and that is only going to flare up even more.

Whatever’s going to happen in Israel and Palestine in 2023 is going to be pretty significant. It’s with a heavy heart that I keep watching Afghanistan and what’s happening to women there. It’s hard to believe that whatever’s happening in Afghanistan is in any way sustainable. The food crisis is pretty significant. There are peace talks in Yemen constantly ongoing. It’s starting and stopping. There is a little bit of hope for some light there. There are plenty of stories that are fascinating.

I’ve been getting into covering Latin America a little bit more. I’ve been to Brazil to cover the elections, which was fascinating and interesting. That is a real inflection point for Latin-American politics and geopolitics going forward. That’s worth a watch. I was fortunate enough to go into the Amazon. I covered issues of deforestation. I talked to scientists, researchers, and indigenous communities. That fascinates me, so I’d like to continue on that beat.

How long were you down there?

We were there for about two weeks. We were covering the politics from Sao Paolo in the first round of the election. It was pretty thrilling to go to those political rallies. We were very much aware of the potential for political violence. I was showing up to these rallies with my gas mask. We had check-in times with our foreign editor and rendezvous points that we had to get to.

It was so peaceful in the end. I know that it’s early days, but it was much better than expected. I’m not used to saying that in my line of work. It was nice to be standing there drinking a caipirinha in the street and chatting with people. However much the election results may have disappointed some, there was no violence, which was encouraging to see.

Other than what happened on January 8th.

Since then, we’ve seen the scenes in Brasilia. We’ve seen the strikes by some of the truck drivers. Whether or not that foments a seriously formidable movement that could threaten democracy is unclear. Whether it simply becomes a particularly noisy, flamboyant opposition is going to be the big question going forward.

The way that you broke into the industry was very unique. For somebody who wants to be a journalist, what advice would you give them in terms of trying to break into the industry at this point in time?

It varies depending on where they are in their career. I would say that the most important thing for wanting to be an actual journalist and an international journalist is to not follow the crowd when it comes to the story. I walked the streets of Kyiv. It was jammed with reporters, which was wonderful. That’s a massively important story. What’s happening in Ukraine has enormous implications geopolitically.

If you’re trying to build a career and you’re young and inexperienced, go somewhere else where you have something that can contribute to stories that are not being covered, whether or not you’re going to cover migrants trying to make it to Greece from Turkey or whether you’re off in any number of countries in Africa covering stories there. I would say to try to find something original and untold. That’s the best way in.

Jane Ferguson on breaking into journalism: If you’re trying to build a career, and you’re young and very inexperienced, go somewhere where you have something you can actually contribute, telling stories that are not being covered.

The only other thing I would say is whether you’re in print or TV, but much more so in TV, it’s unfair. It’s subjective. It is incredibly difficult. I write about this a lot in my book. It’s incredibly difficult to navigate this wild industry. It doesn’t know what it wants a lot of the time and has very few openings. The only way to stay sane and to keep moving forward is to be massively wedded to your craft. Be the best writer, filmographer, or producer. Constantly strive to improve your actual craft as a reporter rather than trying to rely on contacts, openings, and the interpersonal politics of the industry, which is a huge part of it. Be undeniably brilliant at what you do. No one can best you on that.

We’ve talked a little bit about your book. What book have you recently read that has particularly influenced you?

I read a pretty brilliant biography of Angela Merkel.  It was by Kati Marton and called The Chancellor: The Remarkable Odyssey of Angela Merkel. It was released in 2022. It was inspiring to read about Angela Merkel’s life and her stoicism. The challenges that she faced that were on the surface unbelievably insurmountable, and yet, it was the way she approached life and massive diplomatic challenges with a certain degree of moral fiber that she had. She had this set of values that she stuck to, which you don’t see a lot in politicians. I loved that book.

I also read a novel. I do not make nearly enough time to read fiction, but I read a novel called A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra. It is set in Eastern Europe. It’s fiction, but it’s set in war. It’s Chechnya and rebels that are rising up. There is an unbelievable amount of repression that’s going on. It’s about how individuals survive. I’ve never read a piece of fiction that captures individual characters caught in dictatorships, crackdowns, uprisings, an incredible amount of brutality, and repression. It sounds horrible, but the book is surprisingly uplifting, defiant, and brilliant. I loved that book.

I’ll have to check it out. This has been great. I could listen to your stories all day. I appreciate you doing this, and I appreciate your time.

No problem at all. I loved it. It was a great chat.

Thanks. Have a good rest of your day.

—

It was great having Jane on the show. I appreciate her joining me and discussing her incredible experiences as a foreign correspondent in the Middle East, Africa, Southwest Asia, and other parts of the world. Catch her reports on PBS NewsHour and in The New Yorker. Be sure to read her upcoming book, No Ordinary Assignment, when it’s published. If you’re ready to take control of your career, visit PathWise.io. If you’d like more regular career insights, you can become a PathWise member. You can also sign up on the website for our newsletter. Follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. Thanks. Have a great day.

Important Links

• PBS NewsHour
• No Ordinary Assignment
• The Chancellor: The Remarkable Odyssey of Angela Merkel
• A Constellation of Vital Phenomena
• LinkedIn – PathWise
• Twitter – PathWise.io
• Facebook – PathWise.io

About Jane Ferguson

Jane Ferguson is a special correspondent for PBS NewsHour, a contributor to The New Yorker, and the author of the upcoming book No Ordinary Assignment, which will be released in July. Her work as a journalist includes time at CNN and Al Jazeera, and her reporting on war, uprisings, humanitarian crises, and other geopolitical events has taken her all over the world, including to Afghanistan, Brazil, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Somalia, and Sudan, Syria, the UAE, Ukraine, and Yemen, among others.

Jane was born in Northern Ireland and briefly studied in the US before moving to England to study English Literature and Politics at the University of York. Her unique and fearless style of journalism has earned her a number of industry awards, including an Emmy Award, George Polk Award, Alfred I. DuPont Columbia University Award, Aurora Award for Humanitarian Reporting, Peabody Award, Overseas Press Club of America Peter Jennings Award, and Gracie Award.

Jane has previously been based in Abu Dhabi, Beirut, and Kabul. She currently lives in and works from New York.