For award-winning war correspondent Jane Ferguson, journalism is storytelling. She spent 15 years on the road pushing the envelope of war correspondence and the boundaries of risk in order to tell the stories of people living in conflict areas. She gives voice to people, humanizes them, listens to them, and refuses to allow them to become statistics. She has risked her life in places such as Somalia, South Sudan, and Afghanistan. She was one of eight journalists to stay in Kabul until the very last British Airways flight left, when the airport was taken over by the Taliban in 2021.
Driven in her early career by ambition, she hoped to get snapped up by one of the major networks. But Ms. Ferguson learned that this wasn’t the most important goal. Along the way, she has discovered her own authentic voice. “I hope that I have pushed the boundaries of creativity, empathy, and hopefully courage—taking risks to tell humanitarian stories,” she said.
Silence and Storytelling
Ms. Ferguson grew up in Northern Ireland during a time of conflict, in the era known euphemistically as the Troubles. She frequently watched helicopters flying overhead, her family’s car was regularly stopped at security checkpoints, and the police station across the road from her school was bombed. The violence, anger, grief, and fear were shrouded in a special kind of silence, partly the result of her deeply reserved Ulster Protestant family culture but also, more broadly, the result of how sectarian societies organize themselves, she said. “Silence is how deeply divided societies manage to function. Even though there are these explosions of violence, people simply decide not to talk about certain topics,” she explained.
As a child, Ms. Ferguson was often deeply frustrated by the fact that information and opinions were being carefully measured around her, and adults told her that she was not allowed to hear conversations. She developed a burning curiosity, refusing to stop asking questions, and also a keen skill of observation. In an effort to learn, she turned to books and the media, and she became fascinated and inspired by the stories of journalists writing from conflict areas. By the time 9/11 happened when she was 17, Ms. Ferguson knew that she wanted to be a journalist. She felt particularly drawn to the Middle East. “Language is such an important part of my life,” she said. “As a kid, I could see people using incredibly stark terms like ‘good’ and ‘evil,’ and yet none of it made any sense. I saw people who were clearly good, committing terrible acts.”
As she pursued her journalism career, she learned that each person has a story to tell, and through those stories, they become three-dimensional to viewers. Ms. Ferguson discovered that the best way to break the silence of war was to listen. “You discover on the road that everybody has something important that they want to tell you. Most people are incredibly grateful that they get a chance, that they’ve even been asked,” she said.
Ms. Ferguson hopes that audiences can connect to the subjects through her reporting. “Ultimately, I’m trying to get people who are hearing the story to connect with the people in it,” she explained. Her joy is crafting stories that get nine or ten minutes of air time—a long time in television. She has done the type of journalism from the front lines of conflict zones that is 70 seconds in length, but “that’s not really storytelling. That’s like a machine gun of shouting,” she said. During a time when everyone can get information from social media, good storytelling can never be replaced. “Storytelling to me is a craft, and that’s what I love: coming away from these unbelievable interviews with people where I feel like I’ve got something really important and special and I get to share it.”
Showing Respect
Ms. Ferguson has faced the existential crisis that many journalists working in conflict zones have: Is it respectful to document and film people experiencing the worst days of their lives? “It’s a very personal struggle for journalists,” she said. “On the one hand, I absolutely believe in what we do, that it helps. Journalists being there helps make sure that there’s some degree of accountability for actions. On the other hand, you don’t always feel like you’re helping.” Her response is to do her best to tell stories well and to offer her work as service. “It has to be about more than the career—it has to be about a sense of service to the world.”
Journalists can often be under tremendous pressure to meet deadlines. Ms. Ferguson knows that it is easy to feel impatient when interviewing someone. “Sometimes people feel like they’re being mined for some sort of specific quote or opinion, but you can’t approach it that way,” she warned. “A lot of people want to tell their story, but they don’t want to answer every invasive question.” She tries to sit and talk with people at length, to listen carefully to what they want to say. “If you sit down and ask someone about what’s going on, or how they are feeling, or what happened to them today after an explosion, people will tell you what matters most to them.” Ms. Ferguson has learned not to make assumptions about what people are going to say because she is so often surprised by their responses.
She also feels privileged to be able to spend time with women in very repressive societies and hear their stories. “The gray areas are where it’s very important to hear from them: Well, this is restrictive, this makes it hard for me, my dad doesn’t like me doing this, or the Taliban won’t allow this; but here’s what we’re doing in place of it. Here’s how we’re trying to manage.” Ultimately, it matters that they are seen as fully realized human beings: “It’s the best I can do.”
Her Own Story
After 15 years on the road, Ms. Ferguson has turned her storytelling on herself by penning her memoir, “No Ordinary Assignment.” Just as she has tried in her career to portray people as complex and real, she has written a book about her life because “I want people to understand me.” The book is a brutally honest account of an unhappy child, an adolescent dogged by fears of not belonging, an ambitious and frustrated young journalist trying to sell herself to networks, and a woman learning how to listen. “I wrote this book to inspire and comfort anyone who is trying to have an authentic life and authentic career but is at times plagued by insecurity,” she said.
She wanted to write the memoir now because she felt that her wild journey on the road had come to an end. She recently married and settled in New York. “Nothing in my story has quite gone the way it was supposed to,” she said, “and I think that ultimately I have found what I was really looking for anyway.” While she isn’t sure what is next for her, she is optimistic about the future of journalism and the future of justice in the world: “It is an irony of what we do: We highlight abuses of power, we highlight suffering because we want people to have better lives, and we believe they deserve them.”
This article was originally published in American Essence magazine.
