Chris Cramer, who held a senior role at Reuters and was head of video production at The Wall Street Journal, died Saturday at the age of 73.
James Hagerty of The Journal writes, “Mr. Cramer, who died of cancer Saturday at the age of 73, helped raise standards for training journalists for dangerous assignments and ensuring they had safety equipment on the road and counseling, if necessary, after returning home. In some situations, he favored hiring armed escorts for journalists. He was a founding member and president of the International News Safety Institute.
“He dated his focus on journalist safety to 1980, when he and 25 other people were taken hostage at the Iranian embassy in London.
“Around the world, journalists could no longer pretend to be in a protective bubble, Mr. Cramer said in an interview with NPR in 2009. ‘We’re being targeted, we’re being imprisoned, we’re being harassed, we’re being assaulted, and sometimes, and all too frequently, we’re being murdered,’ he said. The news safety institute estimates that 47 journalists were killed world-wide in 2020.”
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