The Great Reporters, By David Randall

I fear three newspapers more than a hundred thousand bayonets. ~ Napoleon

Between these pages is a list comprised of the thirteen greatest reporters of all time.

From those who tackled corrupt authorities, unflinchingly forcing the truth into the public realm, to those who marched into war zones, determined to provide the truth to those at home, these thirteen greats show wily determination topped with a layer of world class writing. 

The list includes ten men and three women. Between them, they have toppled empires, reformed the prison service, witnessed dictators' regimes fall to their knees and seen unimaginable horrors as man turned on man. The male reporters' stories are every bit as admirable and impressive as their female counterparts' are, but it is, of course,  the three women who make the cut who Brazen Women will be concentrating on.

Edna Buchanan. Nellie Bly. Ann Leslie. The best three female reporters in history.

While the excellence of their writing and determination to not only find a story but penetrate the very heart of it was something they had in common, their styles and subjects were worlds apart.

Nellie Bly was one of the original female reporters, paving the way for Edna and Ann to follow in her footsteps. Edna Buchanan wrote so well about crime in Florida that readers would sit down and read her articles as if they were reading a novel. And Ann Leslie, the British reporter who, it seems, appeared at every major world event from the 1960s onwards.

Nellie was born Elizabeth Anne Cochran. She was born in Pennsylvania in 1864, during a century which was not kind to its ambitious women. And Nellie was ambitious. She was also a bloody good writer. When she wrote to her local paper, the Pittsburgh Dispatch, having taken issue with one columnist's view that women should be kept indoors making themselves and their homes pretty for their husbands, the editor saw such promise he immediately contacted her to ask for more publishable writing.

And so began the career of 'the best undercover reporter in history'. 

After Nellie had tired of the Pittsburgh Dispatch she made her way to New York, ready to start reporting for national newspapers. Here she hit a wall. No paper would employ a female reporter. It was unheard of. As New York World's editor put it, the idea of a woman working in journalism on a national newspaper was 'almost too far fetched for words.'

Undeterred, Nellie blagged her way into the New York World's offices and proposed an undercover operation. She would pretend to be mad in order to be imprisoned on Blackwell Island, the infamous compound housing those classified as mentally insane. 

Her plan worked. She was hired. Her undercover operation was a huge success. She reported back on the appalling conditions on Blackwell Island, leading to $1 million being ploughed into mental health care. It was a huge story for an unknown reporter, and a female one at that. The rarity of being a woman in journalism worked in her favour too. She managed to find story after story operating as an undercover reporter, no one suspecting that a woman could be a reporter.

By this time other female journalists were emerging to challenge her crown. So, to make sure she continued her role as queen, she made a suggestion met by scandalised shock. She was going to travel the world in less than eighty days. Alone. Without a chaperone. 

It was unheard of. A single woman could not possibly travel alone. But Nellie could, and she would. And despite delays, detours and missing visas, she beat the eighty day deadline by twelve days, returning to American shores to a celebrity reception.

Nellie had opened doors to women in the journalism industry, showing with single minded determinism that women could report just as well as the very best of the men. And it was through these doors that Edna Buchanan strolled seventy two years after Nellie set off to navigate the globe.

In 1961 a 22 year old Edna moved to he warm climates of Miami and secured her first job in the press. She was untrained, her jobs prior to this having been behind the counters at Woolworths and a dry cleaners. Yet the Miami Beach Daily Sun was correct in giving her her first break, as Edna rose through the ranks to emerge as 'the best crime reporter there's ever been.'

After comprising the entire reporting team on the Miami Beach for a number of years, Edna made a move to a larger newspaper where she began to concentrate on her specialist subject. Always interested in criminals, preferring to read the crime pages to fairy tales as a child, her early interest held her in good stead as she began to investigate illegal activity which at the time, was rife in Florida.

Murder followed robberies that followed drug rings. Edna was forging a career as crime correspondent in a state which was red hot with underhand dealings. In 1981 the murder count stood at 621 on Edna's patch alone, and still Edna pursued the story on each one, blatantly disregarding her personal safety. Drug gang warfare had broken out. There was shootings, abductions and rapes. Edna kept investigating and continued reporting, whether these dangerous figures wanted her poking her nose into their business or not. If Edna had a story she could release, she released it. Whether it was concerning a local teenager fresh from committing his first crime, or evidence of a police cover up on the highest level, Edna released it.

Whatever she was writing, her trick, or perhaps her skill, was writing opening lines that leaves a reader desperate for more. Time and time again Randall quotes examples of articles that capture your attention and refuse to loosen their grip. Edna Buchanan was told by one of her teachers that she would amount to nothing, 'not even a good housewife.' Edna Buchanan did amount to something. She is a Pulitzer Prize winner, a successful author, and considered, by David Randall at least, as the second best reporter of all time.

The third woman to make Randall's list is the only non-American female on it. Ann Leslie was born in Pakistan in 1941, to British parents.

In contrast to the untrained Edna, who had left school at 16, Ann was a graduate of the prominent Oxford University, having won a scholarship to study English. Also unlike Edna, Ann was not at all enthusiastic about reporting, applying for a journalism job solely because it seemed 'the least unappealing of available options while she decided what she really wanted to do with her life.'

It would have been a huge loss not only to the world of journalism, but to the world as a whole if Ann had indeed found something else she wanted to do. Happily for us, she didn't. Instead she caught the reporting bug and became 'the most versatile reporter ever'. 

It was in 1962 that Ann started her first reporting job, working in the Daily Express's Manchester office. Almost exactly the same age as Nellie had been when she had been trying to get someone to hire her in New York, Ann rang into similar attitudes to those Nellie had encountered. It was eighty five years later, but Anne felt some men were no happier to have a woman in the office than they were in the 1870s.

As a young woman, she wasn't taken seriously, often fobbed off to report on none stories. Until the 1960s rolled through Britain and suddenly Ann's youth seemed rather desirable. She could be the way for the Express to appeal to those young readers somewhere between childhood and middle age.

Despite this change of attitude, Ann was still deployed to cover soft stories. This isn't what she wanted. By this time, the reporting bug held her firmly in its grasp and she longed to travel the world reporting on serious stories that mattered.

Ann went freelance for a while, but was soon lured back under the roof of the mainstream press by the Daily Mail's then editor, David English. It may be said here that then 'the rest was history'. Indeed, Ann spent the next few decades almost literally following history around the globe. 

She was there when the Berlin Wall fell, following the story from the press conference (incorrectly) announcing the border to the west was open, all the way through to the triumphant drive through Checkpoint Charlie, a night Ann describes as the most emotional of her life. She was there when the shock not guilty verdict was announced at the end of the OJ Simpson trial, and she was there when Nelson Mandela was finally released from prison.

But it is the stories Ann had to dig to get, the ones that bubbled away deep under the surface, which makes Ann so impressively brazen. She was the only journalist to reach the front line at Gorazde, after convincing the Serb soldiers she longed to see an old orthodox church there. It was a risky play, but one that paid off when she had her scoop. 

She reported from Haiti, bitterly damning the spoilt attitude of the Haitian princesses who complained about being inconvenienced by the oil and weapon embargo imposed upon them as men in their thousands died around their luxury palaces. Ann reported this regardless of any consequence that might face her from upset authorities. 

She was in China when North Koreans began crossing the border, desperate to escape what Ann felt was a 'massive, largely unreported famine'. But, in my opinion, she is at her most brave and brazen during her report in Bethlehem in 2002.

Randall writes how 200 armed Palestinians were holed up inside the Church of the Nativity. The media were being kept away, allowed no where near the church.

In typical Ann Leslie style, she shed all safety equipment and attempted to get through the checkpoints as a 'dingbat middle aged mum'. She was successful. With nerves of steal she walked through the heavily armed guards who were prodding other journalists back with their guns. At one point she even convinces guards to present her with a map of Bethlehem. She gets within 50 yards of the Nativity Church itself before gunfire rings out and she is advised strongly to leave. This is just one occasion where she risks her life to bring the story to the masses.

I feel a notable mention must also go out to the men on the list. It would be wrong to not acknowledge them. 

George Seldes, whose determination to expose truth and corruption annoyed and frustrated public figures so much that he became a target of Joseph McCarthy's communist-witch hunt in a bid to get rid of him. 

J.A. Macgahan, who spurred the collapse of the Turkish Empire by exposing their barbaric treatment of the Bulgarians, causing the Russian-Turkish war of 1877-78 the aftershocks of which can still be felt today. 

Ernie Pyle. The American travel writer who covered World War Two from the front line, sending home articles with the personal touch, so much so that American citizens took him to their hearts. Ernie fell during the war and is buried alongside soldiers as one of them.

And William Howard Russell; A.J. Liebling; Richard Harding Davis; James Cameron; Floyd Gibbons; Hugh McIlvanney and Meyer Berger. Each of them changing society for the better using the pen as their weapon.

Brave, inspirational, brazen. The kind of reporters any writer wishes to be.