It is usually with a sense of mild dread that I open e-mail missives from my editor – they invariably indicate that one of our rivals has a story that we don’t or I’ve dropped the ball in some other unspeakable manner – but his latest message was different.

Titled “Correspondent safety,” and coming after the bloodiest year ever for journalists around the world, it was another pointed reminder of the dangers that some of us face.

In the first week of January, Sunday Mirror defense correspondent Rupert Hamer died of his injuries after an improvised explosive device went off beside the United States Marines vehicle in which he was traveling in Afghanistan’s Helmand province.

Hamer was 39 years old, left a wife and three young children and was the first British media death of the current conflict in Afghanistan. His death made front pages across the United Kingdom and clearly prompted a degree of soul-searching on foreign news desks with correspondents currently in hot spots. That concern may very well have been elevated by fears among the bean-counters about rising insurance premiums for hacks headed for war zones – but that’s another issue entirely.

My editor’s mail went out to all his correspondents around the world, irrespective of whether they were in Baghdad or the Bahamas, Jerusalem or Japan, and made it very clear that anyone thinking of going anywhere that might possibly include a hint of danger was expected to call in to discuss the risks attached.

”If anyone is thinking of travelling to areas where safety is an issue, then we work with you to decide whether the trip should go ahead,” the e-mail read. “In most cases the answer is still yes, but the exercise is vital as it forces desk and correspondent to answer in advance questions about preparation and contingency planning.

”No serious news-gathering organization can operate without its reporters occasionally putting themselves in dangerous situations. But we take great care here to make sure that the dangers are worth it, and minimized.”

His final paragraph was the kicker.

”The last point I want to make is the most important: we do not seek copy from reporters who are taking excessive risks; we do not look favorably on great stories filed from places you should not be; no one here will think less of your career prospects if you decline to go somewhere because of safety: on the contrary, a pragmatic and cautious approach to foreign reporting is what we seek.”

A couple of years ago, I attended a press conference in which our colleagues Richard Lloyd Parry and Steve Herman detailed some of the situations they had found themselves in while reporting from the badlands of Afghanistan, Indonesia and Iraq. A decade earlier, inspired perhaps by the depiction of The Sunday Times’ John Swain in The Killing Fields or Mel Gibson in The Year of Living Dangerously, I would have truly envied them. Those were precisely the sort of scrapes I dreamed of getting into when I used to listen to Robert Fox reporting for the BBC from the flight deck of HMS Hermes when Britain was battling it out with Argentina over the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic in 1982.

But listening to Richard and Steve, I no longer found myself envying them even going through the hostile environment training course or the medical training – let alone doing it for real in the field.

So, as fellow writer – albeit fictional – Carrie Bradshaw always poses the rhetorical question in her “Sex and the City” column, I would like to ask: The biggest danger I face each day is the Yamanote Line; have my professional ambitions changed to the point where they revolve around the paycheck and the (relatively) easy life of hacking in Japan, or are they just in hibernation?

And if the answer is the latter, can they be achieved in Japan or is it necessary to somehow get out of this bubble? ❶