The Frontline Club is a media club and registered charity created by Vaughan and Pranvera Smith, located near Paddington Station in London. With a strong emphasis on conflict reporting, it aims to champion independent journalism, provide an effective platform from which to support diversity and professionalism in the media, promote safe practice, and encourage both freedom of the press and freedom of expression worldwide.
Since opening its doors in 2003, Frontline Club has hosted over 1,200 events. Its founders do not receive wages and the events programme is almost self-sustaining, mainly from membership fees and ticket income.
Discussions, held most weekday evenings, are broadcast live. Past participants include John Simpson, Robert Fisk, Jeremy Paxman, Tim Hetherington, Nick Robinson, David Aaronovitch, Alan Rusbridger, Jeremy Bowen, Louis Theroux, [1] Gillian Tett, [2] Christina Lamb, Julian Assange, Jon Lee Anderson the late Benazir Bhutto, the late Boris Berezovsky, the late Alexander Litvinenko, and his widow, Marina Litvinenko.
The club includes a restaurant open to non-members, a club room, meeting rooms, two lodging rooms and a discussion forum as well as an annex with 12 bedrooms available to members [3] The club also hosts film and documentary screenings and organises training and workshops in such skills as camera operation and film editing.
In May 2011, broadcaster Louis Theroux said in an interview with the Evening Standard that the Frontline Club was his favourite London club. [4]
The Frontline Club opened in 2003. It was founded by surviving members of Frontline News TV, a cooperative of freelance cameramen formed during the chaos of the Romanian revolution in 1989.[ citation needed ]
It specialized in war reporting for television. [5] Vaughan Smith, one of two surviving founders of Frontline News TV, turned the operation into a club, offering a meeting place for those who believe in independent journalism, as well as to honour dead colleagues. It also aims to lobby for better support for the freelance journalistic community.[ citation needed ]
The clubroom has a display of relics drawn from the history of war reporting since the Crimean war. Cabinets show personal items, some with shell still embedded, that have stopped a bullet and saved a journalist's life. The walls of the Frontline Club display examples of war photography and artwork.[ citation needed ]
In December 2010 Vaughan and Pranvera offered Julian Assange of WikiLeaks their private home, Ellingham Hall, in Norfolk as an address for bail. [6] Assange had been staying at the club for two months. [7]
In 2019 the club launched Frontline Freelance Register [8] for freelance journalists and reporters operating in war zones to help them with issues related to welfare, digital security and insurance. [9] The register states on their website "The Frontline Freelance Register" (FFR) is open to international freelance journalists who are exposed to risk in their work and who adhere to our Code of Conduct. We aim to provide our members with representation and a sense of community."
John Richard Pilger was an Australian journalist, writer, scholar and documentary filmmaker. From 1962, he was based mainly in Britain. He was also a visiting professor at Cornell University in New York.
Phillip George Knightley was an Australian journalist, critic, and non-fiction author. He became a visiting Professor of Journalism at the University of Lincoln, England, and was a media commentator on the intelligence services and propaganda.
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Frontline Television News is a cooperative of freelance cameramen formed during the chaos of the Romanian Revolution in 1989. Founded by Vaughan Smith, Peter Jouvenal, Rory Peck and Nicholas della Casa. During the next 15 years they went on to film some of the most memorable images of modern television, despite paying a huge cost. Altogether eight cameramen, some linked directly with Frontline News TV, others indirectly, were killed while working.
T. Christian Miller is an investigative reporter, editor, author, and war correspondent for ProPublica. He has focused on how multinational corporations operate in foreign countries, documenting human rights and environmental abuses. Miller has covered four wars—Kosovo, Colombia, Israel and the West Bank, and Iraq. He also covered the 2000 presidential campaign. He is also known for his work in the field of computer-assisted reporting and was awarded a Knight Fellowship at Stanford University in 2012 to study innovation in journalism. In 2016, Miller was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Journalism with Ken Armstrong of The Marshall Project. In 2019, he served as a producer of the Netflix limited series Unbelievable, which was based on the prize-winning article. In 2020, Miller shared the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting with other reporters from ProPublica and The Seattle Times. With Megan Rose and Robert Faturechi, Miller co-won the 2020 award for his reporting on United States Seventh Fleet accidents.
David Leigh is a British journalist and writer who was the investigations editor of The Guardian and is the author of Investigative Journalism: a survival guide. He officially retired in April 2013, although Leigh continued his association with the newspaper.
WikiLeaks is a non-profit media organisation and publisher of leaked documents. It is funded by donations and media partnerships. It has published classified documents and other media provided by anonymous sources. It was founded in 2006 by Julian Assange, an Australian editor, publisher, and activist. Since September 2018, Kristinn Hrafnsson has served as its editor-in-chief. Its website states that it has released more than ten million documents and associated analyses. WikiLeaks' most recent publication of original documents was in 2019 and its most recent publication was in 2021. From November 2022, numerous documents on the organisation's website became inaccessible. In 2023, Assange said that WikiLeaks is no longer able to publish due to his imprisonment and the effect that US government surveillance and WikiLeaks' funding restrictions were having on potential whistleblowers.
The Online News Association (ONA), founded in 1999, is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization located in Washington D.C., United States. It is the world's largest association of digital journalists, with more than 2,000 members. The founding members first convened in December 1999 in Chicago. The group included journalists from WSJ.com, Time.com, MSBN, TheStreet.com, and FT.com, among other outlets.
The Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism, named for the war correspondent, Martha Gellhorn, was established in 1999 by the Martha Gellhorn Trust. The Trust is a UK-registered charity. The award is founded on the following principles:
The award will be for the kind of reporting that distinguished Martha: in her own words "the view from the ground". This is essentially a human story that penetrates the established version of events and illuminates an urgent issue buried by prevailing fashions of what makes news. We would expect the winner to tell an unpalatable truth, validated by powerful facts, that exposes establishment conduct and its propaganda, or "official drivel", as Martha called it. The subjects can be based in this country or abroad.
Henry Vaughan Lockhart Smith is a British video journalist. He ran the freelance agency Frontline News TV and founder of the Frontline Club in London. The Guardian has described him as "a former army officer, journalist adventurer and rightwing libertarian."
Mónica Villamizar Villegas is a Colombian American broadcast freelance journalist, working for PBS Newshour, Univision. She was previously a reporter for Vice News, CBS, Al Jazeera English and ABC News.
Julian Paul Assange is an Australian editor, publisher, and activist who founded WikiLeaks in 2006. He came to international attention in 2010 after WikiLeaks published a series of leaks from Chelsea Manning, a United States Army intelligence analyst: footage of a U.S. airstrike in Baghdad, U.S. military logs from the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, and U.S. diplomatic cables. Assange has won multiple awards for publishing and journalism.
David Loyn has been a foreign correspondent since the late 1970s, mostly with the BBC. He is an authority on Afghan history.
Ellingham Hall, Norfolk
Luke Daniel Harding is a British journalist who is a foreign correspondent for The Guardian. He is known for his coverage of Russia under Vladimir Putin, WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden.
Kevin Gosztola is an American journalist, author and YouTuber known for work on whistleblower cases, WikiLeaks, national security, and civil liberties. Formerly the managing editor of Shadowproof, he writes for The Dissenter. Previously, The Dissenter was part of Firedoglake (FDL). Gosztola has covered the court-martial of Chelsea Manning, the case of John Kiriakou, and the extradition of Julian Assange.
Iona Craig is a British-Irish freelance journalist. Since 2010 her reporting has focused on Yemen and the Arabian Peninsula.
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In 2012, while on bail, Julian Assange was granted political asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he sought to avoid extradition to Sweden, and what his supporters said was the possibility of subsequent extradition to the US. On 11 April 2019, Ecuador revoked his asylum, he was arrested for failing to appear in court, and carried out of the Embassy by members of the London Metropolitan Police. Following his arrest, he was charged and convicted, on 1 May 2019, of violating the Bail Act, and sentenced to fifty weeks in prison. While in prison the US revealed a previously sealed 2018 US indictment in which Assange was charged with conspiracy to commit computer intrusion related to his involvement with Chelsea Manning and WikiLeaks.
Views on Julian Assange have been given by a number of public figures, including journalists, well-known whistleblowers, activists and world leaders. They range from laudatory statements to calls for his execution. Various journalists and free speech advocates have praised Assange for his work and dedication to free speech. Some former colleagues have criticised his work habits, editorial decisions and personality. After the 2016 US Presidential election, there was debate about his motives and his ties to Russia. After Assange's arrest in 2019, journalists and commenters debated whether Assange was a journalist. Assange has won multiple awards for journalism and publishing.
Media related to Frontline Club at Wikimedia Commons