15 Pioneering Female Journalists

Cover of “On the Front Line: The Collected Journalism of Marie Colvin” (Image via HarperPress)

8. Marie Colvin

Unlike some of the other journalists on this list, Marie Colvin lived during a time where it was conceivable that a woman might become a respected and well-traveled reporter. However, that did not make the job any less difficult or dangerous.

Colvin was born in Queens, New York, and grew up on nearby Long Island. Though she eventually graduated with an anthropology degree from Yale University, journalism proved to be a stronger draw. She worked for United Press International shortly after graduation, then moved to The Sunday Times, a British newspaper, in 1985. Colvin rose to become the newspaper’s Foreign Affairs correspondent, specialising in particular on the Middle East.

She also worked in other regions, including Sri Lanka, Chechnya, Sierra Leone, and Kosovo. In East Timor, she refused to leave a compound under siege by Indonesian-supported troops. Approximately 1,500 women and children inhabited the compound. Colvin’s reporting from the site is credited with helping to secure the evacuation of the people there.

In 2001, Colvin lost the use of her left eye after a grenade, launched by the Sri Lankan Army, detonated near hear. She thereafter wore a black eyepatch, making her even more distinctive. However, she was not just a woman in an eyepatch; she also won numerous awards, including the International Women’s Media Foundation award for Courage in Journalism after her reporting in Kosovo and Chechnya.

In February 2012, Colvin entered Syria to cover the civil war there, despite government sanctions against foreign journalists. In the city of Homs, she described the bombing as some of the worst she had ever experienced. Along with photographer Rémi Ochlik, Colvin was killed by an improvised explosive device planted in a media building.

Colvin was often uninterested in the mechanized details of war. Rather, she preferred to focus on the human cost of conflict, saying: “My job is to bear witness. I have never been interested in knowing what make of plane had just bombed a village or whether the artillery that fired at it was 120mm or 155mm.”