Writing Coach Podcast 184: Human rights reporting with Sara Cincurova

WCP184 Human rights reporting with Sara Cincurova

Sara Cincurova is a freelance human rights journalist from Slovakia, focusing on migration, conflict, human rights, humanitarian issues, and women’s rights. She has written for The Guardian, BBC News, The New York Magazine, Al Jazeera English, Der Spiegel, Foreign Policy, The HuffPost, The New Humanitarian, Women’s Media Center and many more.

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Sara Cincurova is a freelance human rights journalist from Slovakia, focusing on migration, conflict, human rights, humanitarian issues, and women’s rights.

She has written for The Guardian, BBC News, The New York Magazine, Al Jazeera English, Der Spiegel, Foreign Policy, The HuffPost, The New Humanitarian, Women’s Media Center and many more.

Sara extensively covered the conflict in eastern Ukraine since 2014 and reported from Kharkiv and other cities in Ukraine as of  February 24, 2022. She has reported from more than twenty countries, and investigated issues such as sexualized violence against women dissidentents in Venezuelan prisons, violence against pregnant refugees in Libyan detention centers, women who were forced to cross the Mediterranean during pregnancy, forced sterilizations of transgender people in Slovakia, and investigated how domestic abuse impacted disabled victims in Covid times. 

In this episode, Sara shares:

• How pitching, reporting, and writing stories that matter differs for smaller and larger reaching publications
• Challenges of being embedded on a search-and-rescue vessel in the Mediterranean as a journalist on board, and participated in the rescue of 408 refugees
• Follwing up with pregnant refugees, documenting what happened to them and their babies
• Using deep reporting for multiple outlets
• Interviewing sources about prior and current trauma
• Establishing safety and the importance of authenticity when reporting on a humanitarian crisis
• Desire to share the truth and protect others
• Working as a freelancer when war broke out 

🔗 Mentioned in this episode: 

Sara Cincurova’s website

Sara Cincurova on Twitter @Sara_Cincurova

‘Parents risk children’s lives – the alternative is worse’: on board a migrant rescue ship in the Guardian

‘All I Can Do Is Pray’: Elderly and Disabled Women Left Behind in Eastern Ukraine in Women’s Media Center

My journey out of Ukraine in the Cut

Women rescued at sea reveal scale of alleged Libya abuses in the New Humanitarian

Committee to Protect Journalists

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