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"In the wake of a video showing the murder of photojournalist James Foley, the world has been reminded that members of the media now occupy a new place in conflict zones \u2014 as valuable hostages for groups desperate for money and attention.\nNews of the Foley video spread quickly on Tuesday \u2014 and the group behind it, the Islamic State, had banked on it doing so. The video contained a message for President Barack Obama, who condemned the barbaric killing on Wednesday.\nSee also: Obama Mourns Journalist: Islamic State 'Has No Place in the 21st Century'\nThe video also serves as a grim reminder that journalists are often captured with hardly any public acknowledgment. The other American journalist in the Foley video, freelance journalist Steven Sotloff, had been kidnapped in August. That had not been widely known due to a media blackout, according to a friend of Sotloff's family.\nThe potential for a video like this to send a message straight to a president highlights the enhanced danger that now comes with conflict journalism. Reporters are all too aware that they have become targets. Their employers have taken notice too, with many media organizations mandating \"hostile environment training\" to teach journalists what to do in the event of a kidnapping. \n\nIt is a grim necessity, given what journalists now mean to extremist groups. \"The only value of journalists now to these folks is either as an economic commodity or, as happened tragically yesterday with James Foley, as a vehicle for communicating terror,\" said Bruce Shapiro, executive director of the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma.\nJournalist kidnappings have been on the rise in the last decade. Reporter Jill Carroll spent 82 days as a hostage of Sunni militants. Stephen Farrell was kidnapped three separate times. David Rohde escaped Taliban captivity after more than seven months.\nIt can be difficult to figure out exactly how many journalists have been kidnapped in recent years. As Rohde, now a journalist with Reuters, noted in a recent blog post, many of the kidnappers contact families for a ransom and insist that they not tell the media.\nThe kidnapping of journalists is a relatively new issue. Reporters in conflict zones well understood the risks, but occupied a relatively sheltered position. \"Pre-Internet and pre-social media, pretty much all parties to wars and conflicts understood that they needed journalists to communicate their message, their view, to get the word out,\" Shapiro says. \nAnother part of the problem: major media organizations have closed foreign bureaus and become reliant on freelancers as cheap alternatives. \nWithout the backing of major media organizations, these freelancers tend to be at even more risk \u2014 especially if they and their families happen to live in the country where the conflict is taking place.\nBorzou Daragahi, now Middle East correspondent for the Financial Times, remembers the kidnappings started in Iraq about a year after the U.S. invasion. \nStationed in Baghdad for the Los Angeles Times, Daragahi's office lay outside the fortified Green Zone. He and his fellow journalists rode in armored cars with armed guards, abiding by time limits at sensitive scenes like car bombings.\n\"We were among the few foreigners who were there who were fairly soft targets,\" he said. \"We weren't in the Green Zone. We were out in the city, so yeah, it was always a problem.\"\nThe kidnapping of journalists is not as much of an issue in Iraq anymore, Daragahi believes. The uneasy truce between Sunni and Shiite in the country has provided some safety for reporters. The problem now, he pointed out, is now in Syria, where Foley is believed to have been killed.\nThe practice of kidnapping reporters has only grown in the past few years, particularly in Syria and Ukraine.\nDaragahi said that with rebel groups competing against each other for land and resources, journalists in Syria make easy targets for ransom or as a commodity to trade with other groups. He compared that situation to Iraq, which he said is far safer by comparison.\n\"[Syria] is really one of the most dangerous places in the world in a very, very real sense,\" he said. \"There's no incentive for anyone to kidnap journalists right now in Baghdad.\" The Committee to Protect Journalists said more than 80 journalists have been kidnapped in Syria alone. \n\"I don't know that people really realize the incredible risks that journalists are taking and how dangerous doing journalism has become,\" says Courtney Radsch, advocacy director for the CPJ. \"The past couple of years have been among the most deadly on record for journalism.\"\nUPDATE, August 21, 2014, 12:04 ET: This post was updated to correct the spelling of David Rohde's name. \nHave something to add to this story? Share it in the comments."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2014/08/20/conflict-journalists-kidnapping-james-foley/>