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“Nobody will know a country better than local journalists,” Reporters Without Borders’ Delphine Halgand tells me, “and they are always the first victims. They are the first killed, the first kidnapped, the first imprisoned.”

Yet while foreign correspondents are safer than local reporters in Turkey, they’re in greater danger than they used to be. Amnesty International has observed — along with a lot of people here who wear press badges — that the Turkish government is targeting more international journalists.

So it’s worth asking: what makes some foreign journalists more vulnerable than other foreign journalists? How can they be better protected? And if foreign correspondents can’t be connected to local affairs as closely as locals themselves, does it even matter?

For more than a century and a half, foreign correspondents have brought their notepads, then their typewriters, and then their 11-inch MacBook Airs to Istanbul. Turkey is important in its own right, but ever since God invented cheap flights, journalists have been able to write about European, Middle Eastern and Central Asian affairs while based here.

Somehow, while readers back home have become more interested in local road construction problems than far-off human rights violations, and while cash-strapped news agencies have taken their expensive foreign desks out to the curb, the ranks of international correspondents in Istanbul have more than doubled in the last decade.