Associated Reporters Abroad (ARA) - Professional freelance journalists reporting for media outlets worldwide

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As we mark the one year anniversary of the protests and uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Syria and Morocco (as well as to a lesser extent, Jordan, Bahrain, Algeria and elsewhere), we thought it was important to share some of what we experienced while covering them as freelancers, and what it meant to us, why we did it and the difficulties we faced, not officially belong to an organization backed by a 1,000 pounds of ink so to speak.For the past five year, newsrooms in the US and elsewhere have decimated their foreign bureaus and cut back on the number of reporters they have abroad. They banked on their readers not caring. They didn't bank on the so-named Arab Spring that compelled people around the world to sit up and notice - and read.

And while they scrambled to send reporters to the Middle East and North Africa, not even the largest news organizations could cover them unendingly as the uprisings went on - and those that ended quickly still had much to report on in their transition periods - so they relied on us, the freelance foreign correspondents. Sometimes it got ridiculous, too: Everyone news outlet broke their rules about only using 'their' reporters or only using 'experienced' reporters or even only using reporters that could speak English. Everyone wanted news, and the harder it was to get into a country, the more 'rule-breaking' desperation there was.

What I saw, throughout the year, as the editor of ARA, were experienced reporters who sometimes struggled to earn a living, yet couldn't help themselves - they had to cover this - it was, and remains, a once in a lifetime story. I was personally accused of finding Europe boring by an intern last year (I am based in Berlin). I supposed I did when compared to the stories bursting across the Mediterranean. I hate to admit it but while the eurocrisis matters, it pales compared to the story of people fighting for their freedom, and dying for it, while politicians fiddle and fuss, as Athens, Rome and Lisbon burn, so to speak.

I saw reporters disregard costs and just go to Libya, Egypt and Syria. Disregard safety. Disregard whether they had commissions or not. Others tried to get involved from Europe and make the calls. Sometimes we got creative in how we managed to cover the uprisings, but we wanted to so much, and some of us did it on our own dime, or money we raised, just hoping to break even.

Editors in the US and Europe were the same. Anything we could get, mostly they would take. While expenses were hard to get covered, they did try to throw a little more our way sometimes. What they really did is keep the space, budget and interest for the stories alive. It might not always have been as much as we wanted but it was more than I expected.

And while staff editors sometimes have little concept of the struggles of freelancers (one asked me why I couldn't contact my colleague in North Africa via a satellite phone as if freelancers can afford that!!!), I also saw new organizations step up to the plate when freelancers got taken hostage, at huge costs to themselves. They learned, and I would say, we did, too, about new ways of getting stories covered at a high standard and still staying solvent.

If coverage of the Arab Spring wasn't perfect, it was better than could have been hoped for because news organizations learned to do things a new way and freelancers stepped up. This blog is dedicated to those freelancers, us, and our thoughts and experiences.

- ARA team, Jan. 25, 2012