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Jeff Kofman is a storyteller. With over 30 years of reporting experience in the U.S. and abroad, Kofman’s knowledge of reporting is deep and diverse, with stories about the Haitian coup of 2004, 30 men trapped in a collapsed Chilean mine and the Iraq War all under his belt.

On Tuesday night, Kofman brought his reporting expertise to the Joyce Hergenhan Auditorium at the Newhouse School of Public Communications to speak to students about his coverage of the Libyan Revolution, a story for which he won an Emmy. Kofman’s talk, titled “Storytelling in Conflict: From the Frontlines of Libya to the Trenches of Tech,” traced his journey as a reporter in Tunisia and Libya during the Arab Spring in 2011 through his current job as the founder and CEO of Trint, an online transcription service.

Kofman began his presentation by clarifying what the Libyan Revolution was and where geographically his reporting was located. With the help of a PowerPoint presentation, Kofman illustrated what the broader Arab world is — the 22 countries in the Middle East and North Africa that compose the Arab League.

In January of 2011, Kofman, who was working at the London Bureau of ABC News, first received word of the political turmoil in the Arab world, which would set the stage for the forthcoming Arab Spring.

“The foreign editor, I remember, got on and said, ‘Well, I never thought I’d begin by talking about Tunisia, who knows where that place is, but they just had a little revolution,’ Kofman said. “Twenty-eight days later, the dictator who ran Tunisia for 22 years fell.”

This revolution in Tunisia created a ripple through the rest of the Arab League in 2011, otherwise known as the Arab Spring, Kofman said. He was sent to Libya on assignment to cover the conflict regarding the country’s dictator, Muammar Gaddafi, who had oppressively controlled the country since 1969. Kofman also said the geopolitical importance of Libya stemmed from its position as a major gas and oil supplier to southern Europe.

Having served as a foreign correspondent in a variety of countries, Kofman took a moment to explain how he covered stories while abroad. Kofman worked with a small team on assignment, which included two security guards — one of whom was a paramedic — a producer, a cameraman and a translator. The team utilized satellite phones and a BGAN, a small satellite connector that allowed the team to send footage from Libya to the ABC News office in New York, while on the ground. Kofman said that using the BGAN highlighted a big truth about foreign reporting: high-stress stories pertaining to global conflict are often more about transmission than journalism.

As Kofman continued to tell his story, he touched on his drive through the Sahara desert to get to Tripoli, the capital of Libya. Through the desert, he encountered the bodies of Libyan rebels who had died during the conflict, which he said was a powerful thing to see. Kofman also said that during the drive through the Sahara, their vehicle broke down multiple times, delaying the ABC team’s ability to get to Tripoli in a timely manner.

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When Kofman and his crew were on their way to Tripoli, he said that much of the footage they were transmitting back to New York was not shot live, or by his team themselves. Kofman said this is simply a part of modern foreign correspondence.

“This is what foreign correspondent work is today; very rarely do you shoot all of your work,” Kofman said. “That was all agency footage from BBC, Associated Press, maybe Reuters, etc. that were scooped together in New York and put together. That is the nature of journalism at this level, most of the time.”

Once Kofman’s team made it to Tripoli, though, they spent much of their time in war-torn areas gathering footage and interviewing locals. In one clip Kofman showed of his work, he and his crew were shot at from snipers in Gaddafi’s complex. The same clip shed light on the dangerous, often scary conditions citizens in Tripoli were living through to gain revolution.

At the end of Kofman’s talk, he stopped for questions from the audience. Many pertained to how Kofman handled his mental and physical health while experiencing trauma in his work life. Others asked how Kofman balanced fear and professionalism in harrowing situations, to which Kofman said that fear was not absent from his work as a reporter, but he learned to manage it.

The final question of the night was a request for advice from Kofman on breaking into the foreign correspondence industry, to which he responded with advice for those interested in global and domestic journalism.

“It’s tenacity; it’s perseverance — you have to want to do it. You have to believe you can do it. And you need a bit of luck,” Kofman said.

Published on April 27, 2022 at 12:57 am