The freeing of freelancers Amanda Lindhout and Nigel Brennan has led to much discussion about the well-worn path taken by aspiring journalists who took personal risks to make a name for themselves.

There has been much finger-wagging towards the pair for putting themselves in danger with very little protection and little experience in how to handle risk (some of that finger-wagging was mentioned in a recent Radio Silence post that looked at a New York Times article and a column by a veteran journalist, and then a follow-up post that began with a look at Canadian columnist Andrew Cohen's harsh words for Lindhout).

Much of this writing has not properly answered the question of how to bridge the reality faced by Lindhout and Brennan (along with the subsequent criticism), with the tried, tested and true methods used by journalists going back more than a century to get their "break" in journalism by freelancing conflict reporting.

A more recent column by veteran journalist Cliff Lonsdale seeks to address that gap. When he was 16 years old, he hitch-hiked across two countries in Africa in the 1960s to report on conflict and nation-building efforts, most notably in the DRC. Like Lindhout, he was only writing for a small home-town paper, so there was no initial international attention for this writing. In the column he very clearly spells out how that venture put his career on track:

It worked for me. At nineteen, I was interviewing President Kenneth Kaunda for Zambia's national daily newspaper, The Northern News, on his return from a meeting of the Organization of African Unity. At twenty, my agency work was appearing in a variety of Fleet Street papers. At 23, I was deported from Ian Smith's Rhodesia. At 30, I was chief news editor for CBC Television. I've worked since in many parts of the world as a freelancer and an independent documentary maker, and now in my sixties, I'm teaching journalism at the graduate level at the University of Western Ontario.

His message to young journalists? Don't do what I did. As he says, the situation for journalists has changed. Whereas he faced people who wanted to steal his wallet and watch, those in many of the world's least stable regions now see journalists differently-- as key to getting attention and/or money for their cause.

The world has changed in many ways since I was in Amanda Lindhout's shoes. The gunmen I (mostly) managed to avoid in Congo simply wanted to shoot me and take my money and my watch. The ones she encountered understood there's much more to be gained by playing the long game, with foreign reporters as pawns.

The world has changed in other ways, too. I tell my students that I'm the last of the dinosaurs - the ones who were able to launch themselves into a journalism career equipped with little more than curiosity and a notebook. I''s a good thing, too. Learning almost exclusively from your mistakes was never really a very good way of becoming a pillar of democracy.

It's an interesting take, and one that seems to go the furthest in explaining why what others did in the past was seen as noble and/or ambitious while what Lindhout and Brennan did has been termed by many to be foolish and dangerous.

For some further background on Lindhout and Brennan:

One more Radio Silence Post

Two posts from Frontline Club, which sum up the whole 15-month ordeal:

The announcement of their freeing

A worthwhile reminder that they weren't the only freelancers in captivity