Talk:Vaughan Smith

Edit requests from the article subject, July 2026

REQUEST A: for Talk:Vaughan Smith

Post as a new section titled: Edit requests from the article subject, July 2026

Declaration. I am Vaughan Smith, the subject of this article, editing under my own name. Per WP:COI I am not editing the article myself and ask uninvolved editors to review the following specific, sourced requests. I have tried to keep each one minimal and verifiable. Thank you for your time.

A1. Correction of fact: month of the Prekaz incident. Current text (Career): "While he was filming the Serbian action at Prekaz in April 1998, a bullet lodged in his mobile telephone." Requested text: "While he was filming the Serbian assault at Prekaz in March 1998, a bullet lodged in his mobile telephone." Reason: the attack on Prekaz took place on 5 to 7 March 1998, as the linked article states. Independent sources placing me there in March 1998, including the telephone detail: The existing citation to David Loyn's Frontline Club piece can remain alongside.

A2. Correction of fact: Frontline Television News (known as Frontline News TV) had four founders. Current text (lead): "He ran the freelance agency Frontline News TV and founder of the Frontline Club in London." Requested text: "He co-founded the freelance agency Frontline Television News (known as Frontline News TV), of which he later became the sole owner, and founded the Frontline Club in London in memory of colleagues killed while reporting." Current text (Career): "During the '90s, Smith also ran Frontline News TV, an agency set up in 1989 to represent the interests of young video journalists who wanted to push the envelope of their profession." Requested text: "During the '90s, Smith also ran Frontline News TV, an agency he co-founded in 1989 with Peter Jouvenal, Rory Peck and Nicholas della Casa to represent the interests of young video journalists who wanted to push the envelope of their profession." Reason: the agency was founded by four people, not by me alone, and the current lead sentence is also ungrammatical ("and founder of"). The company's registered name is Frontline Television News Ltd and Frontline News TV is the name in common use, so the requested wording carries both, matching the article at Frontline Television News, which already names the four founders. Sources: I subsequently became the agency's sole owner; Loyn's book documents the agency's history and I can supply page references on request. If editors prefer the narrowest change, "co-founded" alone corrects the substantive point, and the memorial clause (supported by the sources in A6) can be taken or left separately.

A3. Infobox: removal of "Restaurateur" and "Farmer" from the occupation field. Current infobox occupation field: "War correspondent, Restaurateur, Farmer". Requested: "War correspondent" (with "journalist" added if editors prefer; the lead calls me a video journalist). Reason, Restaurateur: no source cited in this article describes me as a restaurateur, and I am aware of none that does. I founded the Frontline Club, a media institution which operates a public restaurant; I have never owned or run a restaurant business. Unsupported descriptors of living people should not stand (WP:V, WP:BLP). Reason, Farmer: the article's farming references rest on a December 2010 profile. The farming operation at Ellingham has ended and the farmland has been sold. An infobox occupation should be a current, defining and sourced description of the subject, and this one is now none of the three (WP:BLP, MOS:DATED). The farming category (Category:21st-century English farmers) should follow the same outcome, at editors' discretion. See also A4.

A4. Currency: the farming paragraph in Current activities. Current text: "Smith also runs a mixed organic farm on his estate at Ellingham Hall, in Norfolk, a 'sprawling and elegant Georgian manor house near the town of Bungay' which has belonged to his family for more than three centuries. The estate is '[s]urrounded by 600 acres of woods and fields. . . . It has 10 bedrooms, a large dining room with a convivial circular table, and portraits of Smith's ancestors hanging on the walls.' The farm specialises in pedigree rare-breed pigs, and provides the seasonal food for the Frontline Club and its public restaurant." Requested text: "Smith formerly ran a mixed organic farm on his estate at Ellingham Hall in Norfolk, which has belonged to his family for more than three centuries. At the time of a December 2010 profile the farm specialised in pedigree rare-breed pigs and provided the seasonal food for the Frontline Club and its public restaurant." The existing citations can stand, as the requested text claims nothing beyond them. Reason: every claim in this paragraph is cited to sources from 2010 and 2011 but written in today's voice. The farming operation has ended and the farmland has been sold, so the present tense is no longer accurate (WP:BLP, MOS:DATED). I am deliberately not asking editors to add any new fact on my say-so, only to date and past-tense what the existing sources support. The quoted house description (acreage, bedrooms, dining room, portraits) belongs, if anywhere, in Ellingham Hall, Norfolk, which covers the house; I leave that to editors' discretion.

A5. The lead quotation: attribute it to its date and context. Current text (lead, closing sentence): "The Guardian has described him as 'a former army officer, journalist adventurer and rightwing libertarian.'" Requested change: move the sentence into the Current activities section, directly after "In 2010, Smith gave refuge to Julian Assange...", reworded: "The Guardian, profiling him at the time, described him as 'a former army officer, journalist adventurer and rightwing libertarian'." If editors judge the description due weight for the lead, the alternative is to date it inline there: "In 2010 The Guardian described him as 'a former army officer, journalist adventurer and rightwing libertarian'." Reason: I am not asking for the quotation to be removed; it is accurately cited. But it is one writer's characterisation from a single December 2010 profile, and as the closing sentence of a three-sentence lead it reads as a timeless summary of a living person. Per WP:NPOV (attribute opinions to those who hold them), WP:BLPSTYLE and lead weight, a dated opinion descriptor should carry its date and context where the reader meets it. For transparency: my first book publishes on 22 July 2026 and may attract independent coverage of my published views (its argument concerns extraction and containment rather than left against right politics); if reliable sources cover that, I may propose one short sourced sentence in future. I am not asking editors to act on that now, and I will not offer my own publications as sources for it.

A6. Addition of fact: the Frontline Club's memorial purpose. Current text (Current activities): "Smith founded the Frontline Club in London in 2003 as an institution to champion independent journalism and promote better understanding of international news and its coverage." Requested text: "Smith founded the Frontline Club in London in 2003 as an institution to champion independent journalism and promote better understanding of international news and its coverage, and as a memorial to colleagues from Frontline News TV who were killed in the course of their work. Eight cameramen connected with the agency died while working, among them two of its four founders, Rory Peck and Nicholas della Casa." Sources: Note: the article on Frontline Television News already carries the four founders and the roll of the dead, cited to the first and third sources and to the Loyn Guardian gallery in A2.

A7. Replacement of two unsourced sentences in Awards with sourced content. Current text (Awards): "As a freelance cameraman Smith won, either individually or as part of a team, 28 news awards. Most of them were for The Valley, a film which Smith produced about the Kosovo War, which remains one of the most acclaimed documentaries ever shown on the UK's Channel 4 television." Requested replacement: "In 2011 Smith won the Bayeux Calvados-Normandy Award for war correspondents in the grand format television category for Blood and Dust, filmed with a United States Army medevac unit in Afghanistan and broadcast by Al Jazeera English. In 2025 the municipality of Skenderaj in Kosovo declared him an honorary citizen for his reporting of the 1998-99 Kosovo war." Sources: (The Al Jazeera citation already in the article's Films section supports the broadcast; the Prishtina Insight citation in A1 supports the Skenderaj honour.) Reason: both existing sentences have carried for years and I cannot supply a source for the figure of 28; per WP:V and WP:BLP unsourced claims should not stand, and I would rather the section contain less that is verifiable than more that is not. If editors locate a source for the 28 figure I have no objection to its restoration. The related sentence in the Career section ("As a freelance cameraman, he won, either individually or part of a team, 28 news awards (see below)") should be adjusted or removed to match, at editors' discretion. This request does not touch the Films section, where The Valley remains listed.

A8. Addition: freelance welfare record, and completion of the 2008 Rory Peck Awards passage. Current text (Career) ends a paragraph: "He has worked on journalist safety programmes." Requested addition after that sentence: "Smith was a founding trustee of the Rory Peck Trust, established after the death of Frontline cameraman Rory Peck in 1993, and served as a trustee for ten years. In 2013 he instigated the creation of the Frontline Freelance Register, a representative body for freelance journalists working in conflict zones, following a meeting with journalist Emma Beals." Sources: Second, related part, in the Awards section. The article already records that I was a 2008 Rory Peck Award finalist for a film about Grenadier Guards in Helmand and quotes the ceremony speech in which I criticised broadcasters for failing to credit freelance camera operators; that passage is correctly cited to The Guardian's contemporaneous report and I am not asking for it to be changed. I request one sentence be added to it: "Smith told the ceremony that he had been working for the BBC when he was shot in Kosovo, and that the resulting news report had not named him, referring to him as 'our cameraman'." Sources: the Guardian report already cited in that passage, and two contemporaneous Frontline Club posts carrying the speech in full, offered as supplementary citations under WP:ABOUTSELF (my own organisation's site, used only for the text of my own speech): The shooting itself is the incident covered in the Career section (see A1); I am not proposing any further change there.

A9. Addition: first book. Requested addition (Current activities, after the Frontline Club sentence): "Smith's first book, The Extraction Pattern, was published by Frontline Club Books on 22 July 2026, with a foreword by the neuroscientist Katalin Gothard." Source: Note to reviewers: the book was published on 22 July 2026. The source above is the publisher record and supports the book's existence, publisher and date. Independent press coverage has begun appearing and I will add citations to it in this thread as it does; editors may prefer to wait for that coverage before adding the sentence, which I understand.

A10. Personal life: privacy of non-notable family members and currency. Current text: "Smith lives at Ellingham Hall in Norfolk, England, with his wife, Pranvera, and their two daughters, Beatrice & Louise, and they also have a son called Henry." Requested text: "Smith lives at Ellingham Hall in Norfolk, England. He has five children." Reason: the sentence relies on a single 2010 source, is no longer current and names family members who are not public figures; per WP:BLPNAME the names of non-notable family members, including children, should generally be omitted. The existing Guardian citation supports the residence, and the infobox already records five children. I am not proposing any addition about my family circumstances; where current sourcing is absent, the BLP-compliant course is less personal detail rather than more.

Thank you for reviewing. I will respond to any questions here. HVaughanLSmith (talk) 16:27, 23 July 2026 (UTC)