| How to be a freelance foreign correspondent |
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| Written by Richard Powell | |
| Wednesday, 27 July 2005 | |
  Daily Telegraph foreign desk supremo Paul Hill explains what he looks for in a foreign correspondent and how to get onto his hallowed international pages...So what does the foreign manager of a newspaper that turns 150 this year expect from a modern freelance foreign correspondent?" Firstly, there are hundreds if not thousands of correspondents out there," Paul warns. "We have about 60 worldwide - all with a huge command of English in terms of punctuation, syntax, grammar, and more importantly they are able to tell a story well. I don't ever expect to have to rewrite their words substantially. That's the quality aspect, bar a bit of tweaking."  Hill: 'Ask the right questions and sound confident and you'll be given a shot' "We use global correspondents, but their English has to be perfect. If their English is no good how can they interview someone properly and translate their responses accurately?" he asks. The main requirement for a reporter to get onto Paul's pages is, in his own words, to be "in the right place at the right time". One such example of a chance encounter turned success story is Alec Russell who is now the paper's Washington bureau chief. He started as a backpacker in the Romanian capital, Bucharest. "I actually took the first call from him," Paul recalls. "It was at the time when Romania was the first communist country to shake before the lot came tumbling down. Alec was a travelling journalism graduate who'd never contacted a paper before. But he phoned me to say there were tanks rolling down the streets and would I be interested in a piece about it? ‘Well, yes we would!' I said. "His copy was not very good at the time and it needed a lot of work, but we had a guy on the street giving us an eye-witness account of what was actually going on, and we were the only paper to have that. "As time went by we made him our correspondent there. He travelled for us, got on the staff and was re-appointed to Johannesburg. Later on, he came in as the foreign editor here, my boss! Now he's the Washington bureau chief – a fantastic success story! Right place, right time. "So, if you've got the sense to identify a story that's under your nose and contact a paper about it, you could get lucky." Anyone who's wanted to report for the mainstream press will appreciate the frustrations you encounter when you cold call a desk, but the deciding factor is mainly due to your circumstances, Paul says. "If there are umpteen staffers and stringers around you, your chances of getting in are likely to be zero, but if someone senior gets shot in front of you or you're in an earthquake or a plane crashes and you're there and ask the right questions to the right people and sound confident, then you're going to be given a shot at it. "That's the way it works." Continue to: How to be a foreign correspondent - Part 2
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