Reporting on the dangers in and around Syria

Reporting on the dangers in and around Syria
Reporting on the dangers in and around Syria

Reporting on the dangers in and around Syria

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Despite the amount of news coming out of Syria, President Assad’s regime still has a strong hold over foreign journalists’ access into the country. Only a handful of outside journalists are allowed in, mostly through crossing the border from Turkey.

Former Chicago Tribune reporter Stephen Franklin is one of those lucky few, thanks to a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. Franklin is primarily focused on the lives of Syrian refugees - nearly 1,000  women, children and elderly per day as the men stay behind to fight - as they escape into Turkey and sustain emotional and “war-like” physical injuries. He’s also working with the Columbia Journalism Reporting on dissidents within Syria: the citizen journalists who have been subject to harsh brutality, and the Kurdish people, a much-maligned minority group within the country.

We were lucky enough to be in contact with Franklin over the past few days, and he joins Afternoon Shift Thursday via Skype from the Syrian border to discuss the situation in Syria and his journalism work there.