Risk, deception and the uncertain future of traditional news platforms dominated the remarks last week of three George Polk Award winners.

Jim Sciutto, ABC World News senior foreign correspondent, and Leila Fadlel, McClatchy Newspapers’ Baghdad bureau chief, discussed how they juggle the demands of news and safety during a panel discussion in New York.

Both said they misrepresent themselves to get access, rarely saying they’re reporters. (“You do what you have to do to get the story,” said Fadel.)

But they’ll never lie to or reveal sources, whose cooperation with reporters might get them killed.

Sciutto has had 12 Iraqi assignments. In 2006, ABC colleague Bob Woodruff was seriously wounded when an improvised explosive device hit a convoy. Then, Sciutto felt “real fear – not just a theoretical risk.” Each time he returns, he said he faces more risk and less freedom to report. To reduce the possibility of a pre-arranged attack, he said he remains only a few minutes in one location.

Network budget cuts have forced him to be much more “nimble,” he said, sometimes traveling with just a cameraman and filing via the Internet.

Calling the eventual end of ABC’s evening news program a “fait accompli,” he said he thinks a 24-hour webcast might take its place.

Fadel and her five-person bureau also feel the financial heat. “We have to produce more and more often to be competitive,” she said, augmenting print stories with videos and blogs [“Baghdad Observer” and “Inside Iraq.” The blogs have been praised for providing rare glimpses into ordinary Iraqis’ lives – the details Fadel notes can’t fit into an 800 to 1200-word newspaper piece.

Both correspondents detailed the advantages and disadvantages of traveling with troops. Sciutto, who described himself as the only reporter embedded with U.S. Special Forces units during the Iraqi war, noted “the seduction of embedding…. They’re nice guys and they’re protecting you.” He said he’s “not particularly proud” of his embedded dispatches, noting  in retrospect that he would have used a different tone and sound bites.

Fadel called both embedding and independent reporting necessary to get the complete Iraq picture, because “nothing’s the full story.”

She said embeds don’t see Iraqi citizens’ anger toward the U.S., something she and her colleagues in the bureau can describe in blogs. Accompanying troops to Baghdad’s Sadr City slums, though, doesn’t mean you’re a “bad reporter. Maybe [it means] you’re a smarter reporter.”

Fadel, responsible for Sunni and Shiite staffers’ lives, makes daily trade-offs. Will a story get “you and others killed?” To cut risk, she said, “You need to know how to trick the system,” how to avoid a pre-arranged meeting that may be an ambush.

The daughter of a Lebanese father, she grew up in Saudi Arabia. She’s posed as a wife, mother, a deaf-mute. And until recently, she said, being a woman made it easier to pass as a harmless Iraqi. Now, female suicide bombers “have messed up my plan.”

Besides the danger, there’s the horror of witnessing the carnage of civilian casualties, the task of interviewing grieving survivors.

Why does she do it? “It happens. You can’t close your eyes. Just because you want to look away doesn’t mean it’s not there. ”

Fadel and Sciutto agreed that “citizen journalists” could help traditional reporters, especially in areas the media can’t visit. Sciutto said amateur observers produced a “superb helping hand” when he was covering unrest in Myanmar. Both correspondents noted that journalists and readers alike have to evaluate these reports as they would any other - looking for attribution and distrusting anonymous sources.

Also included in last week's panel was Joshua Micah Marshall, who earned the Polk legal reporting prize for helping trace Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez’s links to the politically motivated firing of eight U.S. attorneys.

The Columbia Journalism Review has called Marshall’s three Talking Points Memo blogs a “miniature news empire.” Marshall is more modest, saying his work simply blends traditional reporting with the research of 300 or so dedicated readers who are “my eyes and ears.” When the Justice Department last year did a Friday afternoon “document dump" of materials relating to the purge of the U.S. attorneys, Marshall posted those reams of content and asked readers to pore over them for nuggets. Their discoveries helped spark mainstream media reporting that led to Gonzales’ resignation.

Talking Points Memo isn’t a new journalism form, he insists, but an attempt to combine commentary and reporting, “so if readers don’t like my point of view, they can still find the information valuable.”
He’s gained a lot of mainstream media attention for becoming the first blogger to win a Polk award, but terms the “blogger versus journalism” idea a “false dichotomy. The blog is just a medium. Some churn, analyze and critique.” Some, like his, report.

Predicting as have others that the print newspaper format will eventually disappear, he says, “That's not that dire if you think in terms of new forms.” In the future, he thinks, as many journalists will be working as now - just in different forms.