The Media : Co-Op’s Video Photographers Shoot the World on a Shoestring : Without resources of major TV news organizations, getting footage from hot spots like Bosnia is risky business for Frontline’s free-lancers.

Two weeks ago, Vaughan Smith was working as a free-lance television cameraman in Sarajevo when a stray bullet whipped through the billowing sleeve of his T-shirt.

Smith shrugged off the episode as one of the perils of his business, recalling: “The shot came through the window of my Bosnian fiance’s family home in Sarajevo. We all hit the deck. And the family was embarrassed that it happened in their home.”

Smith’s business is a new company of free-lance TV cameramen and camerawomen who pursue front-line footage they sell to television networks worldwide.

The enterprise is appropriately named Frontline News Television and is a cooperative of combat-tested TV photographers.

“We have about 20 cameramen in our group,” said Smith, taking a break from the Bosnia-Herzegovina story to return to London and his company’s basement office near Victoria Station.

He is co-director of the cooperative and owns 51% of its stock, taking no salary but sharing in the commissions earned by Frontline’s camera operators in the field.

Frontline News is “a very lean organization,” Smith said, pointing out that “we have to do things on the cheap since each cameraman--or camerawoman, we have three--pays his or her own expenses. . . . They are not staying in five-star hotels.” They also pay for their own insurance.

“Our people are independent souls,” Smith continued. “They pursue the stories they want to--in Bosnia, Afghanistan, Somalia, Rwanda, Central Asia, wherever. But we try to keep the focus on stories that we can sell.

“We work on the cheap--small, home video, HI-8 cameras instead of the expensive Betacams.”

Rather than staying in hotels in Sarajevo, for instance, Frontline personnel might stay at a private home for bed and breakfast.

Frontline’s TV journalists cannot afford the high cost of armored cars in places like the former Yugoslav federation, as American or British network teams can, and therefore often work at greater risk.

A correspondent for one of the American networks commented: “We sometimes buy from them because it’s cheaper and everyone is cost-conscious these days. Also they are good for getting back-stop news footage in difficult places.”

The company had its genesis in the aftermath of the 1991 Persian Gulf War, during which Smith obtained through subterfuge some of the only combat film of the American forces advancing into Iraq with tank guns blazing.

A former captain in the elite British Grenadier Guards regiment, Smith, now 31, left the army and eventually wound up in Pakistan selling micro-light aircraft. There, he linked up with free-lance television camera crews moving in and out of Afghanistan.

He volunteered first as a sound technician, later as a photographer and caught on with a group accompanying John Simpson, foreign affairs editor and roving correspondent of the British Broadcasting Corp.

Smith later covered the Gulf War. Using his ex-army credentials and donning a British officer’s uniform, he managed to bum rides with a forward American unit and rode into battle with it.

“I avoided censorship by getting back to Dhahran (Saudi Arabia) and then to Bahrain, then flying back to Europe with my stuff,” he said.

The BBC’s Simpson recalls that Smith “obtained the best and most spectacular television pictures of the ground fighting.”

With the profit from his exclusive film, which was used by networks around the world, Smith set up Frontline News TV, among whose founding members were highly regarded free-lance cameramen Nick della Casa and Tim Weaver.

But Smith, while skilled in the field, was still an amateur in marketing the film, and he cycled around London delivering the cooperative’s footage to TV offices for possible use. The first year for Frontline News was difficult, with only about $75,000 worth of business, which did not turn a profit.

Near the end of 1991, Anna Roberts, a journalist and TV producer, joined the group to sell the footage and developed a list of about 70 customers, mainly TV networks.

Two other women, Susannah Nicol, now co-director with Smith, and Jane Birch, joined the group to run the office and organize sales and contracts, boosting business this year to about $650,000--and well in the black.

The cooperative’s office markets the product of the field TV photographers and takes between 20% and 25% commission on sales, which constitutes its profit.

As with all combat journalists, the work remains dangerous: Founding member Della Casa was slain by a Turkish guide in the Kurdish mountains of Iraq in the rebellion that followed the Gulf War. Rory Peck, another Frontline cameraman known for his Gulf War shots of an air-raid shelter in Baghdad hit by an American missile, left the cooperative to work on his own in Moscow--and was killed during the firefight when Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin withstood the challenge of the Russian Parliament in 1993.

Smith, who has temporarily based himself in the port city of Split on the Dalmatian coast of Croatia, wants to offer customers a variety of material from his field photographers.

“We are always on the lookout for big, breaking news stories, when we tend to offer our pictures to networks right on the spot--particularly if they have satellite facilities, as in Sarajevo,” Smith said. But he added that the Frontline journalists also package features. “We want to produce the kind of features that hit home, that appeal to editors and audiences. A really good piece can be sold in many different countries’ markets.

“For instance, we put together the piece on the corruption among United Nations forces in Bosnia: Ukrainians selling fuel, the French involved with prostitution. That was a fine exclusive that others picked up on.

“We’re good at wars, but we’re moving into other areas,” he said.

“We also put a man aboard the trans-Siberian express to film Chinese passengers selling their goods to Russians along the way--fake name-brand running shoes, things like that. It made a very watchable feature. . . . For an American network, with their large crews, to do such a trip would have cost too much for them to take a chance on a story.”

Often, Frontline News sells film on the spot at a rate of $1,000 a minute. “If we get a couple of minutes, we might make expenses,” Smith said. “But if they really want something, it will run longer, and we will do much better.”

With the feature stories that take more time, the television package is put together by editors in London. The cooperative, with its 20 journalists, operates largely like an individual free-lancer.

“Ideally, we’d like to get contracts and commissions with networks that would guarantee us fees if we produce. . . . And we’ll go absolutely anywhere we think we can get something to sell.”