War Correspondents

War correspondents provide first‐hand accounts of military conflict for dissemination to the public. The literature of war correspondents manifests a decidedly western focus. War correspondents originated during the imperial age, when British newspapers sought first‐hand accounts of distant continental and colonial wars, and became an institution during major nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐century wars. Newspapers originated the role of war correspondent. The Times of London hired barrister Henry Crabb Robinson to cover Napoleon's campaign in Spain and later employed William Howard Russell to cover the Crimean and Franco‐Prussian wars. Scholarship about conflicts and journalism practices in general focuses disproportionately on western sources.