They\u2019ve documented wildfires, bailout negotiations, and migrant flows\u2014all under someone else\u2019s byline. Now, the Greek journalists behind the world\u2019s images of a country in crisis are reckoning with what\u2019s been left out.<\/i><\/p>\n
By Vivien Wong<\/a> and Isabella Dail<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n In late July, 2023, the Greek journalist Yannis-Orestis Papadimitriou nearly lost his life.\u00a0<\/span>That was always a risk: he had been hired by a group of Australian journalists to take them to the last wildfire left burning on the island of Rhodes.\u00a0<\/span>To give the reporters the best chance of catching the flames before they were extinguished, Papadimitriou had suggested they follow the fire brigade deep into the forest, then up to the blackened hilltop where the firefighters were stationed.<\/span><\/p>\n It was noon by the time he and the Australians reached the top of the hill. They were the only reporters there. Water-dropping planes skimmed low over the valley. The cameraman began to record. <\/span>The fire was far away. Then it was up close: five meters from<\/span> where the reporters were standing. With nowhere else to go, Papadimitriou and the other reporters launched themselves<\/span> down the side of the hill.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Papadimitriou had already had one close call that summer, days after the Greek government began a mass evacuation<\/a> of tens of thousands of people\u2014mostly tourists\u2014from the southeast part of Rhodes. But this second encounter with the wildfires was “far worse,” Papadimitriou said. I<\/span>n total, he and the other reporters fell down about a hundred feet of burned bark and ash. <\/span>\u201cMy clothes were not in the best shape after that,” he <\/span>recalled. Yet to his amazement\u2014then, as now\u2014<\/span>he and the other reporters were unhurt.<\/span><\/p>\n Most importantly, the cameraman had the clip the team needed. But w<\/span>hen the Australian network aired footage of the Rhodes wildfires that Papadimitriou had helped capture, his name wasn\u2019t there.<\/span><\/p>\n Papadimitriou is one of many local journalists across the globe who are hired as news \u201cfixers\u201d by foreign media outlets to arrange (or “fix”) the logistics of their on-the-ground reporting. They are the indispensable\u2014if often invisible\u2014counterparts to foreign correspondents. They typically assist with translation and finding sources, but also bring to the partnership an invaluable fluency in local cultural and political dynamics. <\/span><\/p>\n But like\u00a0<\/span>many other Greek fixers, Papadimitriou can\u2019t recall the last time he\u2019s been credited by a foreign news outlet for a story he’s reported on as a fixer.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n In 2016 and 2017, the Global Reporting Centre <\/span>surveyed<\/span><\/a> over 450 journalists across the world about the relationship between fixers and correspondents. The study found that while 60 percent of journalists reported <\/span>rarely<\/span><\/i> or <\/span>never<\/span><\/i> naming fixers in their published work, 86 percent of fixers would like the opportunity to receive credit.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Papadimitriou said he’s accepted anonymity as part of his job, though he still feels \u201ca bit of bitterness\u201d when a story for which he\u2019s done the bulk of the reporting gets published without his name in the byline. <\/span><\/p>\n Like many journalists, after a piece he\u2019s written gets published, Papadimitriou spends time reading the comments on his story. He obsesses over how his reporting has been received, and whether it\u2019s stirred up any controversy. But for the pieces he\u2019s worked on as a fixer, he has no such ritual. \u201cI don\u2019t see them as my own,\u201d he said. \u201cEven when I\u2019ve contributed most of the reporting.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n *<\/span><\/p>\n In the last fifteen years, Greece has had its fair share of “crisis” headlines in international media. Foreign correspondents have flocked to Greece’s largest cities and smallest islands for pictures of austerity protests,\u00a0<\/span>waves of migrant boats, and raging wildfires. <\/span>Much of the resulting international news stories has relied on the expertise of fixers like Papadimitriou. Yet since these local journalists have rarely been credited in the products of their reporting, it\u2019s easy to miss how<\/em> they’ve shaped international media coverage of their own country in crisis.<\/span><\/p>\n Papadimitriou, who’s worked as a part-time fixer in Greece for almost a decade, first started \u201cfixing\u201d to make ends meet as a journalist. \u201cI started late, actually,\u201d he said. By 2016, there already existed a generation of Greek journalists who had built up the country\u2019s news fixing industry, predicated, in large part, on the 2009 economic collapse. John Psaropoulos, who has been Al Jazeera’s correspondent in southeast Europe since 2012 and covers Mediterranean geopolitics in the Substack <\/span>Hellenica<\/span><\/i><\/a>, was one of the Greek journalists who worked as fixers during the financial crisis in the early 2010s.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n At the beginning of the financial crisis, Psaropoulos had considered leaving journalism for good. <\/span>Athens News<\/span><\/i>, the English-language newspaper where he was editor-in-chief, had gone bankrupt. All around him, major Greek newspapers, hit by budget cuts, were shuttering.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n But even after his job with <\/span>Athens News<\/span><\/i> had ended, Psaropoulos found the Greek story “impossible to ignore.”\u00a0<\/span>He spent lunch breaks wandering down to Syntagma Square, a popular site for political demonstrations, to feel the “pulse” of the protesters.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cGreece was experiencing huge political and social unrest,\u201d Psaropoulos, now fifty-six, recalled over a video call in July. \u201cNo one was sure if the Greeks would get the austerity measures passed, and therefore pick up their emergency loan, and therefore remain solvent, and therefore protect the euro.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n In international headlines, the stories about Greece were pointing to disaster: an unemployment rate <\/span>over<\/span><\/a> 20 percent, hungry pensioners driven to <\/span>scavenge<\/span><\/a> street markets for discarded fruit and vegetables, and violent <\/span>demonstrations<\/span><\/a> in the capital. <\/span>Foreign correspondents and photographers \u201cparachuting\u201d into Greece to capture the economy\u2019s collapse suddenly needed local journalists to interpret what was going on. Psaropoulos became one of these fixers. <\/span>The crisis that had ended one path in journalism for him thus began another.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n On February 12, 2012, riots erupted on the streets of Athens. It was Sunday, hours before Greece\u2019s broad coalition government would pass a package of unpopular austerity measures\u2014including public-sector job cuts and reduced minimum wage\u2014to secure a second bailout from foreign lenders, including the European Union and International Monetary Fund. More than 80,000 people<\/span> across Athens<\/span><\/a> had turned out to protest, many of them gathering in Syntagma Square, just <\/span>outside the Greek Parliament building where politicians were debating the controversial budget cuts. From their room on the fifth floor of the Athens Plaza hotel, which overlooks Syntagma Square, Psaropoulos and his colleagues from Al Jazeera prepared to deliver the first live broadcast of the day.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n The demonstrations soon turned violent. Some protesters took hammers to the steps of the Athens Plaza hotel and were hurling the broken marble chunks at riot police, who responded with tear gas and stun grenades. The hotel was shut down “like a fortress,” Psaropoulos remembers. The lobby was empty, save a few receptionists in heavy-duty gas masks. Tear gas seeped through the cracks under the front doors, so much that Psaropoulos wept as he walked through.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Tim Friend, Al Jazeera\u2019s London-based correspondent, <\/span>had flown in to cover <\/span>the riots with Psaropoulos. Every morning, over coffee, Psaropoulos translated the Greek newspapers for Friend and explained what the latest political developments meant for Greece’s economy. “Y<\/span>ou’re not a financial expert,” Friend recalled of his time as a general reporter in Athens. “<\/span>And you <\/span>know in a couple of hours you\u2019re going to be in front of a camera.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Reporters\u2014many of them foreign correspondents, like Friend, who\u2019d come straight from the tarmac\u2014had booked almost every room of the Athens Plaza. After fifteen years as a journalist in Greece, Psaropoulos recognized almost none. But the hotel room that he and his Al Jazeera colleagues had transformed into a live broadcast point was filled with these journalists. They wanted to know what was going on. They had heard Psaropoulos was the journalist who spoke Greek.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n During the riots, Psaropoulos locked himself in the bathroom of his hotel room to write<\/span> a script for Al Jazeera\u2019s broadcast that day without interruption. <\/span>But between shifts, he emerged to transcribe parliamentary debates, translate the television feed, and explain the slogans being shouted by protesters in Syntagma Square for the correspondents who knew no Greek. <\/span><\/p>\n Though journalists were flocking to the sites of violent protests and burning buildings, Psaropoulos <\/span>believed that the real news was occurring inside<\/a> Parliament. \u201cIt was easy for people to report\u2014and they did\u2014that the people of Greece were spontaneously erupting in protest because they were so deeply unhappy with what\u2019s going on,\u201d he said. \u201cThey <\/span>were<\/i>, but the street protests were also the result of party political organizing.\u201d The protesters\u2019 slogans, he explained to journalists, had been written in center-left and left party headquarters; what was happening was organized.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cHe knew the background, he knew the story,\u201d Friend recalled of Psaropoulos. \u201cNot that I ever thought ‘fixer’ was a subordinate role\u2014it isn\u2019t, in my mind. But he\u2019s a great writer and a great journalist in his own right. I once said to him, \u2018Why do you need me?\u2019 He could do it all.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n *<\/span><\/p>\n In his 2022 book \u201cFixing Stories: Local Newsmaking and International Media in Turkey and Syria,\u201d sociologist Noah Arjomand <\/span>describes fixers as consummate “information brokers.” “Fixers are <\/span>producing what will become the news about the world that shapes everybody\u2019s perceptions of what\u2019s going on,” Arjomand explained on a recent call.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n In April, 2024, prior to parliamentary elections across the E.U., Sue Reid, Special Investigations Editor for the British center-right tabloid newspaper<\/span>\u00a0Daily Mail<\/span><\/i>, traveled to Greece for two days to cover Europe\u2019s new <\/span>far right<\/span><\/a>. Far-right nationalist movements in countries like Spain, she believed, could be traced back to Greece\u2014where, as she explained over the phone<\/span>\u00a0in July, \u201cthe extremes have harnessed themselves to migration.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n In 2015, the number of migrants and refugees entering the E.U. spiked, the<\/span> majority<\/span><\/a> of whom landed in Greece. Proximity to Turkey, a major transit point for those fleeing conflict and persecution in the Middle East, made Greece the main entrance to Europe. Anti-immigrant, ultranationalist sentiments <\/span>once platformed<\/span><\/a> by former far-right political party and <\/span>convicted<\/span><\/a> criminal organization Golden Dawn found fertile ground in the unfolding migration crisis. The 2023 election of three new far-right parties\u2014Spartans, Greek Solution, and Victory\u2014seemed to <\/span>signal<\/span><\/a> a lasting political shift in Greece, one that could be extrapolated to the rest of Europe.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Tony Rigopoulos, then working as editor-in-chief of the left-wing Greek newspaper <\/span>Documento<\/span><\/i>, became Reid\u2019s fixer. For two days of fixing, he was paid 700 euros\u2014almost three times his weekly salary from <\/span>Documento<\/span><\/i>. \u201cI was very happy with the money,\u201d Rigopoulos, who is thirty-five, recalled a year later. \u201cBut I\u2019m not sure if I would do that story again.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Reid told him she wanted to talk to far-right Greek parliamentarians. Rigopoulos gave her a list; he set up the meetings. In one interview, a member of Greek Solution spoke against recent waves of migration. It sounded a lot like Golden Dawn. Rigopoulos, who is part-Jordanian, remembered feeling uncomfortable by the comments. \u201cWhen I heard the guy speaking about being \u2018completely Greek\u2019 and having the \u2018culture\u2019 being blended in with other cultures\u2014and how bad that is\u2014it was kind of pinching me in a very soft spot,\u201d he said. But he translated word for word. \u201cHe was completely efficient and non-political as a fixer,\u201d remembers Reid. \u201cHe did his job properly.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Still, Rigopoulos worried about what might happen if the piece lacked the perspectives of local Greeks. While Reid wrote in her hotel, Rigopoulos took her photographer to a general strike in Syntagma Square to gather protesters\u2019 opinions about Greece\u2019s far-right.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n None of those quotes would appear in Reid\u2019s<\/span> story. The article turned out to be much less critical of the far-right Greek parliamentarians than Rigopoulos had expected. Initially, he\u2019d hoped Reid might credit him somewhere. \u201cBut when I started reading, I thought, \u2018Thank God she didn\u2019t,\u2019\u201d he said. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t really a representation about what the far right is in Greece.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Some international media outlets operate on what Arjomand calls an \u201cextractive model,\u201d where foreign correspondents, usually from the West, come with a pre-fixed story based on stereotypes or the views of the outlet\u2019s audience. In these situations, the fixer is there \u201cjust to fill in the blanks,\u201d Arjomand said.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Rigopoulos has learned to sense when this is the case. It\u2019s a specific attitude some foreign correspondents carry, \u201ca feeling of \u2018I\u2019m the journalist, you\u2019re just translating or driving me or doing those things for me,\u2019\u201d he explained. \u201cThey don\u2019t consider you their colleague.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Perhaps the most striking finding from the Global Reporting Centre\u2019s study was the disconnect between the way fixers and foreign journalists experience their collaboration. Nearly 80 percent of fixers said they\u2019d challenged the editorial focus of a piece, compared to less than half of journalists who said they\u2019d been questioned or challenged by a fixer. Tellingly, the report <\/span>states<\/span><\/a> that many of the journalists interviewed in the study \u201cbristled\u201d at the idea of relying on fixers for editorial guidance; many considered it \u201cinappropriate\u201d to be corrected by a fixer about the content of a piece, since the fixer would be \u201ccrossing over into the professional role of a journalist.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Through each step of on-the-ground reporting, fixers like Rigopoulos make possible the stories that, in turn, will define Greece\u2019s political landscape for an international audience. Even so, the narrative often comes out different from the way the fixer would like it to. \u201cYou have no control when you\u2019re working as a fixer,\u201d Rigopoulos said. \u201cYou follow the angle of the journalist.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n *<\/span><\/p>\n The circle of Athens-based fixers is small and tight-knit. Many of these journalists have worked with the same international news outlets, if not the same correspondents. Others, like Papadimitriou and thirty-nine-year-old Valentini Anagnostopoulou, encounter each other on the reporting trail. Since they met five years ago\u2014while reporting on the trial of an English footballer on the island of Syros as correspondents\u2014the two fixers have overlapped on a few more assignments, including Rhodes wildfires in 2023.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n That summer, Anagnostopoulou remembers receiving a text from Papadimitriou shortly after his run-in with the wildfires, warning her to stay away from the part of the island where he\u2019d nearly died. But after the last wildfires on Rhodes had been extinguished, Anagnostopoulou was approached by Dutch reporter Bram Vermeulen, with whom she\u2019d previously collaborated, about a documentary he wanted to direct about that summer; it would be <\/span>titled<\/span><\/a> \u201cEverybody Goes to Rhodos.\u201d Vermeulen hoped to make the island of Rhodes an entry point to a tension at the heart of Greece\u2019s economy: tourism, an industry that accounts for <\/span>a third<\/span><\/a> of Greece\u2019s G.D.P., puts extreme pressure on its natural resources and local communities, thereby exacerbating the effects of climate change.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n By the summer of 2024, the rebound of hotels, tavernas, and beach bars on Rhodes\u2014all with the purpose of welcoming more tourists (a <\/span>record-breaking<\/span><\/a> 3.5 million between January and September 2024, compared to the island\u2019s 125,000 <\/span>inhabitants<\/span><\/a>)\u2014was staggering. There was little on the island to suggest the scale of devastation that had taken place there the previous year. \u201cThe Greek government did everything it could to forget the fires quickly,\u201d Vermeulen says in the documentary, noting, upon entering a bustling hotel that had burned to the ground only a year before, \u201cThe lobby smelled like fresh paint. It was like nothing had happened.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Anagnostopoulou\u2019s work began before Vermeulen\u2019s arrival: contact out-of-work fishermen, obtain permission to film at luxury resorts, and set up interviews with a local firefighter (who would become the documentary\u2019s central character). In one scene from \u201cEverybody Goes to Rhodos,\u201d Vermeulen asks the firefighter about the sustainability of the tourism industry. Explaining that the islands simply can’t handle the number of tourists coming every summer, the firefighter says, \u201cMany hotels already have problems with water. Imagine how difficult it was for us to find water to extinguish the fires last year.\u201d But he grins when Vermeulen suggests the possibility of capping tourist numbers. \u201cNo,\u201d he says. \u201cThat would mean a revolution here. Because they live from this.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The interview lasts just a few minutes; in the next scene, Vermeulen is seen entering the lobby of the rebuilt Rhodes hotel. But during filming, the firefighter\u2019s candidness about the limited resources available to cope with overtourism had triggered the fire service\u2019s press office in Athens. Anagnostopoulou, the only Greek-speaking member of production, became the de facto go-between for the firefighter and his superiors.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n While continuing to film the documentary on Rhodes, Anagnostopoulou began receiving private messages from the firefighter, explaining that he was under pressure from his superiors to stop talking to the reporters. Vermeulen didn\u2019t seem bothered by the firefighter\u2019s situation. His priority, Anagnostopoulou knew, was to \u201cget as much as possible from the outspoken source, at any cost.\u201d Anagnostopoulou\u2019s goal was the same\u2014to get the story\u2014but she remembers simultaneously feeling an \u201cobligation\u201d to protect the firefighter and “not screw him up.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n In \u201cFixing Stories,\u201d Arjomand describes the intermediary role of fixers, who, as part of their job, must learn to move easily \u201cbetween reporters and sources, between worlds with different cultural and political norms.\u201d Fixers\u2019 \u201cin-betweenness,\u201d the very quality that renders them invaluable as journalists, simultaneously makes them more vulnerable to pressure from both sides.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Years of fixing, Anagnostopoulou believes, have made her a shrewd negotiator. Any hiccup during reporting\u2014whether a negative exchange with a government official or an accusation of unethical behavior\u2014carries consequences far more serious for the fixer than for the foreign correspondent. A correspondent\u2019s <\/span>faux pas<\/span><\/i> can cost Anagnostopoulou relationships she\u2019s built over her entire career. Unlike the correspondent, who can head home after the assignment is over, she said, \u201cI will have to keep working in the same country with the same contacts, the same sources, the same authorities.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n