The credit under the photograph is three words long: *Stringer / Reuters*. No name. No hometown. Nothing that tells you the person who took that picture was standing closer to the explosion than any staff correspondent has stood in two years. * That word is doing a lot of work. Here is what it actually means. * ### The definition, without the romance * **A stringer is a journalist who files for a news organisation without being employed by it.** No salary, no staff contract, usually no health insurance, and — the part that matters most — usually no company security apparatus behind them. * They are paid per piece, per photo, per day, or per broadcast minute. The outlet keeps the copyright arrangement it wants, prints the work under its own brand, and owes the stringer nothing after the invoice clears. * The name is old newspaper slang: freelancers were once paid by the column-inch, their published clippings pasted end to end and measured against a length of string. The economics have survived the string. * ### Stringer, freelancer, fixer — three different jobs * The words get used interchangeably and they should not be. * **A freelancer** pitches stories to whoever will buy them. Independent by choice, often working across a dozen mastheads. * **A stringer** is a freelancer with a standing relationship to one outlet in one place — the person a foreign desk calls when something happens in a city where it has no bureau. Semi-permanent, still not staff. * **A fixer** is the local journalist who arranges the access, the translation, the driver and the safe route — and who is very often the person who actually found the story. We wrote about that job separately, because it deserves its own page. * The common thread: all three do staff work, and none of them get staff protection. * ### Why almost every foreign story you read is stringer work * Bureaus are expensive. Over the last two decades, news organisations closed them at scale and replaced them with a network of local contributors who cost a fraction of a posted correspondent and can be dropped without a redundancy payment. * The result is a newsroom map that looks global and is actually a switchboard. The dateline says the outlet is there. What is there is one person with a phone, a press vest they bought themselves, and an editor eight time zones away deciding whether the piece runs. * ### The number that ends the argument * Freelancers do not just do the dangerous work — they die doing it, disproportionately. * The Committee to Protect Journalists recorded **at least 124 journalists and media workers killed across 18 countries in 2024**, the deadliest year in the more than three decades CPJ has kept records. **Forty-three of them — over 35% — were freelancers**, itself a record for self-employed press. * CPJ then recorded **129 press members killed in 2025**, breaking the record again. * Set that against the staffing reality. Freelancers are a minority of working journalists and a third or more of the body count. That gap is not bad luck. It is a structure: the people with the least institutional protection are sent where the protection would be needed most. * ### The moment the industry admitted it * In **September 2014**, after a run of freelancer deaths and kidnappings in Syria, Agence France-Presse did something unusual. Global news director **Michèle Léridon** announced AFP would **"no longer accept work from freelance journalists who travel to places where we ourselves would not venture."** * Her line was blunt: if someone goes to Syria and comes back offering images or information, AFP will not use it — because buying it encourages the next person to take the same risk. Several British papers, including *The Times*, *The Independent* and *The Guardian*, adopted similar positions on unsolicited work from Syria around the same period. * That policy is an admission with a very specific shape. It concedes that the market itself was the incentive. Every purchased photo from a place the staff would not go was a job advertisement for an unprotected person. * In **January 2015** the industry formalised it. The **ACOS Alliance** — A Culture of Safety — was founded at a safety conference in Washington, and the **Freelance Journalist Safety Principles** launched in **February 2015**, backed by CPJ, the Frontline Freelance Register, the Rory Peck Trust, Reporters Without Borders and the James W. Foley Legacy Foundation. The alliance now lists **160+ news organisations and press-freedom groups** as participants. * The principles are good. They are also voluntary, and a principle is not a contract. * ### Gaza is where the arrangement became visible * The clearest recent illustration is not a scandal — it is a wire service telling on itself. * On **July 22, 2025**, AFP publicly called on Israel to allow the evacuation of its freelance contributors and their families from Gaza. The agency said its people faced an "appalling situation," and that "for months, we have watched helplessly as their living conditions deteriorated dramatically." * The detail in that appeal is the whole lesson. AFP's Gaza operation at that point consisted of **one freelance reporter, three freelance photographers and six freelance videographers**. Its permanent staff had left in **early 2024**. * The agency's own Society of Journalists put it in a sentence that should be carved somewhere: since AFP was founded in **August 1944**, it had lost journalists to conflict, to injury and to prison — but none of them could recall a colleague dying of hunger. * And in the CPJ tally, the name that recurs in this category is a freelancer's. **Mariam Abu Dagga**, a Palestinian photojournalist who had worked for the Associated Press, was killed on **August 25, 2025**. Freelance. Not staff. In the credit line, one word. * ### What the label hides from you as a reader * Three things, all worth knowing before you judge a story: * **1. Risk transfer.** When a byline says *staff correspondent*, an institution accepted liability for that person. When it says *stringer*, it mostly did not. Same danger, different balance sheet. * **2. Editorial distance.** The stringer usually cannot argue with the desk. A staffer who thinks the headline distorts their reporting can fight it in a Monday meeting. A stringer who fights it does not get called next week. * **3. The vanishing act.** Staff journalists get profiles, awards and obituaries. Stringers get credit lines and, sometimes, an agency statement. If you want to know who actually witnessed the thing you are reading about, the credit line is the only place to look — so look at it. * ### How to read a credit line like an editor * - **"Stringer" or an agency name with no personal name** — someone local took the risk; the outlet is protecting them, or not naming them, or both. - **"Contributed reporting from [city]"** at the bottom of a story — that is often the person who did the reporting the dateline is claiming. - **A correspondent's dateline that never changes while the story moves** — the reporting is coming from someone else on the ground. - **"Additional reporting by"** on a wire story — same thing, further down the page. * None of this means the journalism is worse. Stringer work is frequently the best-sourced material in the paper, because the person filing it lives there and will still live there next year. * It means the credit does not match the contribution. That is the honest version of the word. * ### The bottom line * A stringer is the answer to the question the byline avoids: *who was actually there?* The outlet gets the picture, the brand and the dateline. The stringer gets a fee and the risk. * Next time a photograph from a war zone stops you, look under it. If the credit is a single word, you have just learned something about the newsroom that published it — not about the person who took it.