Reporting conflict: competition, pressures and risk

There's something I picked up from Christopher Hitchens, once a foreign correspondent at the old Daily Express, referring to the time when the rivalry with The Daily Mail was at its most intense. It is true, he says, that an Express journalist in some hellhole, his copy surpassed by a Daily Mail man who had received an honourable flesh wound, got a cable: 'MailMan shot. Why you unshot?'

A lot of the navel gazing about this summer's 'liberation' of Tripoli has got more to do with petty rivalries between big corporations than a genuine desire to rethink the way we report conflict.

Four journalists have died covering this war. Documentary-maker Tim Hetherington and photographer Chris Hondros were killed in Misrata. Al Jazeera cameraman Ali Hassan Al Jaber was shot dead in Benghazi. So was Libyan journalist Mohammed Nabbous. Others were held prisoner for long periods of time.

Alex Crawford and her team (don't forget she was not alone but with cameramen Jim Foster and Garwen McLuckie, producer Andy Marsh, and unnamed local fixers) showed tremendous courage when they were the first to broadcast to the world dramatic live pictures from Tripoli as it fell to the rebels. They deserve to be applauded.

This is the nature of our industry: the only real measure of success is whether you are the first with the news.

Alex travelled with a group of rebels who managed to be the first to get into Green Square, the symbolic heart of Gaddafi's Tripoli. This was a journalistic chance which they seized and exploited with great professionalism, but chance nonetheless.

It could easily have been another team and it is not a reflection on the bravery and competence of the other journalists on the ground, including those at the Rixos Hotel who were de facto hostages.

In these situations you put your life in the hands of the local people you travel with. This is an assessment that only you and your team on the ground can make. For me, when going into places like Sadr City in Baghdad, undercover in Zimbabwe, or in the middle of violent demonstrations in Tehran, it was often like being wheeled into the operating theatre: your fate is in the hands of the surgical team. At that point, what your news editors think in London becomes irrelevant.

Coverage of armed conflict requires meticulous preparation, but also a little bit of recklessness. Recklessness because, with all your knowledge and experience, you can never predict what will happen next.

My main question about the coverage of Libya this summer by the British media is not about why Sky News was the first in the streets of liberated Tripoli, but why after that it was left to researchers from Human Rights Watch to discover documents with unsavoury details of links between the British secret service and the Gaddafi regime. And why it was a US network, CNN, which tracked down the man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi.