Middle Eastern reporter dodges bullets and budget cuts

Gunshots ring overhead.
Car bombs detonate around the corner.
Shrapnel flies in all directions.

And Hannah Allam wakes up and greets another portentous morning in a desert, half a world away.

Allam is not an American solider, however. She is the Middle East Bureau Chief for McClatchy Newspapers, and considered to the one of the top foreign beat reporters in the country. She is the daughter of an American mother and an Egyptian father, and is not unfamiliar with Middle Eastern culture, seeing as she is also a practicing Muslim.

“I think just putting a piece of fabric on my head would change [people’s perceptions of me],” she said jokingly during her speech “Bullets, Budget Cuts, and Why We Must Preserve Foreign Reporting” at UGA’s 30th Annual McGill Lecture Wednesday afternoon.

The McGill Lecture was held in honor of Ralph McGill, a revolutionary Atlanta-Journal Constitution journalists that challenged the popular views of discrimination and segregation in the 1960s. McGill’s journalistic “watchdog” tactics preserves the press’ ideals of keeping a keen eye on the government and relaying that information to the people.

“The world is now integrated more than ever, and it is our obligation to readers,” Allam explains to an alert audience. “We need to report on what’s happening now and what’s coming around the bend.”

Journalists need to maintain the courage to guard the bridge between them and their readers at any cost, interpreting the actions of their government for the people. Despite drastic budget slashing at most major newspaper companies causing reporters to become almost entirely self-sufficient, journalists like Allam have still prevailed.

“When you’re not at the big table, you learn to find scraps elsewhere,” she said, explaining how she constructed an entire interactive online story solely by herself. Photography, writing, and editing process were her responsibility because of low funding for her bureau.

Allam exudes the courage necessary to keep the journalism field active and interpretive. She feels that reporters need to continue to serve as security system for the American people so they can “understand what goes on outside [United States] borders.”

So maybe in retrospect Allam really is a solider, even though she wields no weapons and has no special military training. She is a guard dog for the American people, standing in front of the bridge between them and the other areas of the world. And it’s going to take more than bullets and budget cuts to stop her.