Bloom while you can

two big stories on tomorrow's front page, RBS bosses are to hand out £££ in bonuses with one hand, while instigating a pay freeze with the other, plus the death of war correspondent marie colvin in syria. i wonder which RBS boss thinks they've really earned their money when they see what MC did for her wages.

war correspondents are in some ways the journalist's journalist. they hop from hotspot to hotspot, always at the sharp end of breaking news, their name (and face) at the top of a story immediately signalling what is to come. it all looks very glamorous when you're sat in an office, the toughest decision of the day being whether to go to starbucks or costa for an afternoon coffee. yet they can, from all accounts, be a disaster area in other parts of their lives - all that death and destruction, and alcohol and black jokes to get you through, and no atheists in a foxhole thing is tough to explain to the folks back home. as is why daddy or mummy wants to go away and get shot at instead of staying at home to play and read bedtime stories. if you lean towards one source of light too much, it becomes difficult to be beautiful and balanced and well-rounded.

it's not a life i ever considered - i'm too much of a coward, and at the bottom of it i don't think i'd ever be interested enough in any story to risk my life to tell it. does that make me a lesser journalist? maybe. but from what i've read today about marie colvin, and what i hope that the best journalists do all think at the bottom, well, i think she'd appreciate there's a place for me too. there's a place for the person who takes her words and makes them sing all the harder through good design. and someone who has never left their local paper, spent 20 years on the same patch - they aren't lesser either. good journalism is about giving a voice to those who don't have one, whether it's the 28,000 people of homs, syria, who are being besieged and shot at by their own government, or a gang of teenagers who want to build a skatepark so they have somewhere to go after school to keep them out of trouble.

did she get wall to wall coverage because she's female? maybe. because she has the added glamour and mystery of that eyepatch? maybe. so let's not forget the french photographer Remi Ochlik, just 28, who died beside her (check out the WPP site for his award-winning image from libya, and link to his own webgalleries). and there's Paul Conroy, snapper and video man, who was hurt in the same attack, plus french reporter Edith Bouvier, who was seriously injured. and on tuesday there was Rami al-Sayed, a syrian who had videoed - and shared the tapes with the world - what was happening. and let's not forget the 28,000 in homs who are terrified right now, and all those in syria and elsewhere who don't get to sleep in a comfy bed tonight.

giving an address at st bride's (the journalists' church, in london) in 2010, marie colvin said: "Our mission is to report these horrors of war with accuracy and without prejudice. We always have to ask ourselves whether the level of risk is worth the story." was the risk worth it this time? well, to be blunt it's got the story on the front pages, so perhaps it was. many people right now are happy to rip apart the press and journalists in the wake of the hacking scandal - well, here's what real journalists do, mr leveson. if you want to fix the gutter press, start at the top, with the owners. those of us at the sharp end (even those of us who only sit in an office) will carry on doing what journalists do best.