Everyone knows that being that being a journalist can sometimes be a dangerous trade. We all remember high profile cases such as the murder of Daniel Pearl or the seizing of John McCarthy. In truth, while foreign correspondents do sometimes run into trouble, their stories are far outweighed by the experiences of local reporters who - depending on where they live - suffer intimidation, threats, violence and even death. South Asia is no different. Indeed, according to a recent report by the US-based Committee to Protect Journalists, rising violence in South Asia is putting journalists at “severe risk”. In the committee’s list of 14 leading countries where the authorities had failed to solve murders of journalists, six were in South Asia. “The political situation in South Asia is deteriorating,” Shawn Crispin, the CPJ’s Asia programme consultant, told Reuters. “These countries are entering now into eras of sustained armed conflict and as soon as that happens, journalists are immediately at risk.” This year, the region has already see the high-profile murders of a Sri Lankan editor and a Nepali radio journalist. And just this morning, it was reported that an Indian newspaper editor, Anil Mazumder, editor of the Assamese daily Aji (Today), was attacked by armed men when he was returning home in the state capital, Guwahati. Local media reported that Mr Mazumder was sympathetic to separatists in the state. I don’t know if that is true but other reports say he had been urging dialogue between the separatists and the government. In the two years I’ve been working in the region, I have - thankfully - ran into very few problems. Rightly or wrongly, being a foreigner tends to get you special treatment. But I’ve met and talked to plenty of journalists who risk everything for their profession, among them reporters in Burma who spent 20 years in jail, TV correspondents in Orissa who believed they were going to be attacked by mobs and Sonali Samarasinghe, a senior journalist and the widow of Lasantha Wickrematunga, the Sri Lankan editor who was murdered by an armed gang in January in a case that remains unsolved. In each case, their bravery was moving. But so was their sense of duty. In the West, so much “journalism” is tied up covering the meaningless twitterings of gone-tomorrow celebrities. It’s shocking - and frankly sometimes embarrassing - to be reminded that in other parts of the world journalism can be a matter of life or death.