How to file the scoop of war

Meet an unlikely war hero: it's 16 cm high, weighs 4kg and is tough enough to survive the harshest Afghan winter. The Talking Head, the satellite videophone that has brought real-time war reporting to the world's TV sets, is the hottest media accessory since the Tandy laptop.

News organisations across the world have been queuing up to acquire this all-British technological wonder - and at the small 12-person company which makes it, just off the A316 in Feltham, global fame has come as something of a shock.

"It's been an utter nightmare," confesses Peter Beardow, managing director of 7E Communications, facing a backlog of 30 orders, plus almost 400 videophones in action. "We never thought the Talking Head would change how people report news - we just set out to go further than a clanky phone call and a still picture."

After 15 years quietly developing satellite communications gear, Beardow knew something was up on 12 September, when 7E's website logs took 90 minutes to download. Normally, the web-site receives 15 to 20 hits a day from oil companies or expedition organisers; that day brought 30,000, as newsgathering chiefs wondered how they would report from the world's least wired terrain. Word spread that the Talking Head could effectively compress ISDN-quality signals into a narrow bandwidth, which, combined with two Inmarsat satellite phones, could broadcast tolerable TV images from anywhere as long as the reporter had a battery.

News teams pay £7,500 for the box, plus around £5,500 for each of two satellite phones and £18,000 for the receiver unit. CNN, which owns around 30 videophones, used to send reporting teams out with up to 20 boxes of satellite equipment, which were conspicuous, heavy and often had to remain away from the action. When Nic Robertson, then a producer, was in the first team to arrive in Mostar in 1993, he had to carry his camera over the hills on horseback, and then return to base on horseback to send the film back via satellite. Last month, reporting from a mountain north of Kabul, he went straight to air when the US jets began bombing.

The BBC claims to have been first to use the videophone during a website interview with the Dalai Lama in March 2000. But CNN showed its potential last January, reporting from the Indian earthquake at Bhuj, when a standard satellite van would have had to have been kept in a safe zone. Three month s later, video-phones covered the US spy plane crew leaving Hainan Island in China. A bulky satellite dish would have alerted the authorities.

It is nothing new for an emerging technology to shape how a war is reported. When The Times sent William Howard Russell to cover the Crimean War, his dispatches - sent over the newly invented telegraph - told of such military suffering in 1854 that Prince Albert complained that "the pen and ink of one miserable scribbler is despoiling the country". Some dispatches took weeks to get home. But however the story is told - through cable, laptop or mobile phone - the pressures on the reporter remain constant: getting there first.

"All the times I've ever reported a war, the problem has been competition: get your copy in no later than the other man, whether using telephone, cable or laptop," says veteran correspondent Bill (now Lord) Deedes. "I remember that in 1935, during the Abyssinian war, I was stuck in Addis Ababa, having to file from a cable station. It cost about £4 a word, and at one stage, the Abyssinians limited us to 100 words a day. So I was asked to send skeleton pieces to London, where a skilful man in the office wrote them up."

If he reached the cable station before it closed at 6pm, Deedes could expect the story to be in the office by morning.

"Nowadays I travel with a whole raft of equipment, but I'm basically facing the same problem: in a quicker world, how do I have a competitive advantage? If anything, modern technology has made newspaper deadlines slightly earlier. The satellite phone is probably the most valuable thing that a reporter has been gifted with - I used one during the Kosovo war, and could dictate straight to copy. The problem is, your colleagues have satellite phones too."

But the most instant communications technology will fail to deliver if the military can delay dispatches. "I've never met a military press officer, whether in uniform or in a suit, who understood anything about media deadlines," says Robert Fox, the distinguished war reporter now writing for the Evening Standard. "In the Gulf, you could set up a satellite dish more or less anywhere. But in the Falklands, though we had the first maritime satellites, they were only operating from commercial ships; the Navy said we could not travel with one. In 1982, I sent my BBC dispatch from Goose Green on the death of Colonel Herbert Jones on a Friday, and it was not broadcast until Sunday. In the meantime, the Sunday papers were full of absurd nonsense on how he had died." Some reports took weeks to arrive.

So what does Fox make of the videophone? He is not impressed. "It's staggering how little sense many of these real-time reports are making of the battlefield. It's a side-effect of the new technology that reporters have to comment as much as they report. They have to deliver on air more often and spend less time finding out. Most are terrible."

Tony Maddox, editorial chief of CNN International, rejects the criticism. "The technology is now liberating journalists, not putting them under pressure to file too soon," he says.