A foreign correspondent lands in a country they have never worked in. Within thirty-six hours they have interviewed a cabinet minister, filmed in a district the army has closed off, found the family at the centre of the story and got them talking on the record. It reads like extraordinary journalism. Some of it is. * The rest of it is a person whose name is not on the story. That person is called a fixer, and in most of the world they are the reason foreign news exists at all. * **What a fixer actually does** * "Fixer" is a soft word for a very large job. A fixer is a local journalist who arranges what an outsider cannot: translation, sources, permits, drivers, safe routes, an explanation of which official is worth an hour and which one is a wall. They know which neighbourhood is calm this week. They know that the man everyone is quoting is a fantasist. They make the calls in the language the story is actually happening in. * Very often they also do the reporting itself — identifying the story, locating the witnesses, conducting the first interview, deciding what matters — and then hand it to a correspondent who writes it up under their own name. The industry files this under "logistics." It is closer to co-authorship. * **The survey nobody in the business likes quoting** * The Global Reporting Centre put numbers to this in its "Fixing" the journalist-fixer relationship project. Researchers surveyed roughly 450 people working in global journalism across more than 70 countries, with 35 taking part in follow-up interviews — correspondents and fixers both, on the same questions. * Five problem areas came out of it: respect, editorial agency, pay, safety and credit. Every one of them runs in the same direction. * On pay: the survey put fixer day rates somewhere between $50 and $400, depending on the country, the cost of living and how dangerous the assignment was. That is a spread of eight times for what is often the same work, and the number tracks the fixer's passport more than their skill. Late payment came up repeatedly — fixers chasing invoices for months from organisations that had already published the story their reporting produced. * On credit, the finding is blunt: most correspondents admitted they rarely if ever credit their fixers, and most fixers said they would like to be credited. Not paid more, necessarily. Named. * **Why the name matters more than it sounds** * It is tempting to read that as a bruised-ego problem. It is not. Credit is a career. A byline or an "additional reporting by" line is the thing a local journalist can show the next editor, the fellowship committee, the visa officer. Without it, twenty years of work leaves no paper trail proving you were ever there. * It is also a safety problem, and it cuts both ways. Some fixers genuinely cannot be named — in an authoritarian state, a credit line is a target. But the anonymity is supposed to be the fixer's choice, made on their own risk assessment, not a default the correspondent picks for their own convenience. Read our guide to bylines for what that line does and does not tell you; the fixer is the largest thing it routinely omits. * **The part where the numbers stop being awkward and start being grim** * The Committee to Protect Journalists keeps a database of journalists killed for their work, and the pattern in it is not close. Around 95% of journalists murdered are local reporters, not foreign correspondents. In 2023, 77 of the 78 journalists CPJ recorded as killed in relation to their work were local. In at least 40% of murder cases, the victim had received threats before they were killed. * The correspondent flies in and flies out. The fixer stays — in the same town, with the same phone number, reachable by everyone who did not like the story. The person carrying the least credit is carrying nearly all of the risk, and the risk does not end when the piece is filed. It starts then. * **August 2021, and what an exception looks like** * When Kabul fell to the Taliban in August 2021, the people most immediately exposed were Afghan journalists — the fixers, translators, drivers and reporters who had spent two decades working for Western newsrooms, with employment records to prove it. * Some newsrooms moved. On August 25, 2021, a flight carrying 124 media workers and their family members, including New York Times Afghan staff, landed in Mexico City after the Mexican government agreed to take them in. It was reported at the time that the arrangement began with a WhatsApp message from a former New York Times bureau chief to Mexico's foreign minister, Marcelo Ebrard, who took it to President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. * That is a genuinely good story, and it is worth being precise about why: it was an exception, organised at speed by individuals, not a standing obligation that every outlet owed every fixer who had worked for it. Plenty of local journalists in that same city, with the same employment history at smaller or freelance-reliant outlets, were on no list at all. * **What is changing, slowly** * Some of this is improving. A growing number of organisations now add "additional reporting by" tags with the local journalist's name, and some run full co-bylines. Industry guidance increasingly pushes the language away from "fixer" toward "local journalist" or "reporting partner," on the reasonable grounds that what you call someone shapes what you think you owe them. Contracts, insurance and hazard pay for local staff are on more agendas than they were a decade ago. * But the economics still push the other way. Foreign bureaus have been closing for thirty years. The cheaper a story gets, the more of it is done by someone local on a day rate, and the more of the finished product is one flight, one week and one byline laid on top of somebody else's year of knowledge. * **What to do with this as a reader** * Scroll to the bottom. The credit line for the person who actually got the interview is usually the last thing on the page, in the smallest type, if it is there at all. An "additional reporting by" name from the country in question is a good sign — it means the outlet is being honest about how the story got made. * Check the dateline against the depth. A piece filed from a capital that somehow contains fluent detail from three provinces did not get there on a correspondent's fortnight. Somebody local did that work. * And when a story from a dangerous place turns out to be extraordinary, be a little suspicious of the lone-hero framing. Almost nobody parachutes into a closed country and cracks it alone. There is nearly always a second person in that story, and the whole convention of the trade is that you never learn their name.