Ann Leslie and Lindsey Hilsum have spent decades covering war, revolution, famine and the occasional feelgood moment. What's the secret of getting the story?
Why are we still so fascinated by female foreign reporters? Veteran overseas correspondent Ann Leslie and Channel 4 News's international editor, Lindsey Hilsum, meet to discuss this, and the future of foreign news, while Emine Saner listens in.
Lindsey Hilsum: When did you start? Didn't you report on the dawn of time?
Ann Leslie: [laughs] Forty-five years ago. In my day, there were very few women foreign correspondents. There was Martha Gellhorn, but she was one of those women who couldn't stand other women, particularly ones who she felt were muscling in on her territory. That was normal then – I had more trouble with other women journalists than men. Apart from when the men were chasing me around the furniture.
LH: That's not my experience at all. I've found my female colleagues – Marie Colvin, Lyse Doucet and others – are my best friends. We help each other even when we work for competing networks.
AL: My first foreign job was in British Guiana, as it was then. I made a mess of it, and the blokes on the foreign desk said: "See, the girlies can't hack it." But we have great advantages being women, because women, who are often the main victims of war, will talk freely to another woman, particularly in the Middle East.
LH: In Iran, in 2009 after the elections, when there were protests on the streets, we were under hotel arrest, but once I put on that coat and headscarf I looked just like a middle-aged Iranian woman, and I could move around anonymously.
AL: There is an advantage in being able to play different roles. I would carry photos of my young daughter around. And then when I was older, I would say she was my granddaughter, and you immediately get into conversations about family life, even at checkpoints.
LH: Yes, you can defuse tension. What amazes me is there is still so much fuss made about women foreign correspondents. When you started, it was a novelty but now we are all over the place.
AL: If you have children, some people think you are an unnatural woman and mother. It's still deep in the psyche. I have a very supportive husband – we've been married for years – but he had a full-time job, which meant we had to hire nannies. It is difficult if you have children. I always did feel guilty. I never did much war reporting, partly because I had a sprog at home.
LH: I know lots of male journalists with children who get that feeling as well. And they're never asked about their families.
Emine Saner: There has been increased focus on sexual assaults on women foreign correspondents.
AL: Have you been threatened with rape?
LH: No.
AL: I was. It was in the 1970s. He was Palestinian. I got to know him and his wife and children. I was so livid, because he was a friend – I thought. He had a knife, and I have scars on my back.
LH: It is an issue, due to sexual assaults on women during the Arab spring, but there's also a danger men can be sexually assaulted. It has been hard enough for us, as women, to get male editors to send us to these countries, so we have to be careful with special pleading. Most of the dangers for female journalists are just the same for men. The rocket that killed Marie [Colvin, the Sunday Times journalist who died in Syria in February] had nothing to do with her gender.
ES: Is it more dangerous to be a western journalist now?
LH: Yes. Now every guerrilla commander or dictator is sitting there with a bank of satellite televisions, and they all know what we are reporting and saying. They know we are uncovering the evil things they are doing. Before, you could go in and talk to someone and they really didn't have a clue what you were going to say; now they know – and they Google you beforehand. That means we have become targets sometimes, and that's also why sometimes people won't speak to us.
AL: I was never like you or Marie – I was never a war correspondent. Did you ever feel yourself becoming a war junkie?
LH: No. I'm not a war junkie at all. I always think I'm a coward and other people are much braver than me. You worked for the Daily Mail, but you were doing serious stuff. The paper carried so much more serious foreign news then.
AL: All my Guardianista friends say, "How can you work for that newspaper?" but would the Guardian run a two-part series on Azerbaijan? No!
LH: The Daily Mail wouldn't run it now. What I worry about is shorter attention spans. People pick up a bit of news here and there and if you're trying to do something that has any meaning, it's hard to do that in 100 words.
AL: I don't imagine the Mail would run it now. But this is because the competition from celeb stuff is so much more. And it's expensive sending people abroad.
LH: At Channel 4 News, we're quite lucky because it prides itself on its foreign news. If there's a big story, there's never any question [about budgets] but the problem is whether to fund the middle-level story. Last year raised the bar so high that it's hard to get any story on that isn't enormous, because everyone worries about spending the budget ahead of time.
ES: Does pressure on budgets mean relying more on Twitter and local bloggers, rather than sending journalists?
AL: You must be there, filtering, to some extent. You have to sort of smell a place. There's almost a kind of sexual excitement when you land in a new place – you feel something. You don't feel it if you read Google, and a lot of people who write about foreign affairs have never been there. Probably Orpington is the most exotic place they've ever been to.
LH: There are many local eyewitnesses in places like Homs, but the problem is distinguishing between activists and objective observers. In TV, we use a lot of video that comes in, but we've learned complex ways of verifying, whether it's checking the weather, or knowing exactly who sent it. That's almost like a new kind of journalism – being able to "read" stuff from citizen journalists.
AL: But it's not what you and I went into the business to do.
LH: I didn't, but one of the best things is that people from these countries, who couldn't report because of repression, are the ones pushing back the boundaries. I met this young Jordanian woman who did an investigation into corruption, and another woman from Gaza who had got an article on rape within the family into the Hamas newspaper. How fantastic is that? The idea that foreign reporting is just a white bloke or woman going to report on the behaviour of the natives has gone, and that's good.
AL: When I started, people were longing to get their stories out and the only way to do that was to talk to people like me. Now they can get their views out without us.
Lindsey Hilsum's book Sandstorm: Libya in the Time of Revolution is available in the Guardian bookshop (£14.39). Ann Leslie's memoir is Killing My Own Snakes (£7.99, Pan Macmillan).