The pews of Our Lady of the Holy Rosary church in Rochester, N.H., were packed on a cool, damp Saturday in October for a memorial for James Foley. The autumn foliage was peaking in this rural, working-class New England town; if Foley had still been alive, it would have been his 41st birthday.

Foley was a journalist, though the event could easily have been mistaken for a service for a fallen soldier. “Jim died because he was an American,” his brother Michael said from the church’s pulpit.

After the service and a Mass, everyone filed into an adjoining banquet hall for lunch. On top of a table sat a photo album from Foley’s childhood — Jim in a Halloween costume, or wearing Mickey Mouse ears at Disney World — and a scrapbook of clippings that the local paper, Foster’s Daily Democrat, had published during his two periods in captivity. There were lots of articles from the first, 44 days in Libya in 2011. “Detained Rochester Journalist Hopes to Be Home for Sister’s College Graduation,” one headline read. (He was.) From his second, the 600-plus days in Syria that ended with his barbaric beheading in August, there was just one story: “Foley Missing for One Year Now; Family Says Their Faith Sustains Them.” The rest of the scrapbook’s pages had been left blank.

Foley was not the first war correspondent to be killed in the line of duty in recent years, but his videotaped murder made it grotesquely clear that we have entered a new era in conflict reporting. One hundred forty-four journalists were killed in 2012 and 2013, making these the deadliest back-to-back years for reporters since the Committee to Protect Journalists started collecting data in 1992. The year 2014 will end up being nearly as deadly, and will include three American victims. In addition to Foley, there has been Steven Sotloff, who was also beheaded by Islamic State militants in Syria, and more recently Luke Somers, who was killed by Al Qaeda in a village in southern Yemen during an American raid to rescue him and other captives.

All three were freelancers, working without the benefits and safeguards of institutional support; and unlike staffers, they had a direct financial incentive to get the most dramatic images and stories possible, regardless of the risk. All three were covering conflicts in which reporters have not only lost their protected status but have become, quite literally, high-value targets: ISIS collected millions of dollars in ransom payments for Foley’s fellow prisoners. And, if their countries refuse to pay, journalists can be cast in carefully choreographed execution videos advertising the group’s ruthlessness to both enemies and potential recruits.

Before Libya, Foley was an embedded freelancer with the United States military in Iraq and Afghanistan. But he wanted to get closer to the people whose lives were affected by conflict. So he moved on to Libya. This was a revolution, a civil war between the rebels and the defenders of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s government. Foley and a few others went looking for the front lines of the conflict and found it. They were attacked by Qaddafi’s forces. One, Anton Hammerl, was killed, and the rest were taken prisoner by the regime.

After his release, Foley went home to New Hampshire and did a stint as an editor for The GlobalPost in Boston. His family and friends urged him to stay put, but they all knew he’d go back to the Middle East before long.

When he did, heading to Syria in 2012, most American news organizations were already pulling back on their coverage of the region. The romantic revolts of the Arab Spring, embodied by the peaceful mass demonstrations in Tahrir Square in Egypt, had metastasized into violent sectarian warfare across the Middle East. Covering conflicts, especially unconventional conflicts, is an expensive and dangerous proposition. And the public’s appetite tends to be limited for stories from distant war-torn countries with no U.S. boots on the ground.

The vacuum created an opportunity for freelancers like Foley. The bar for entry was low. No credentials were required. All you needed was a smartphone that shot video, some notebooks, a laptop. From southern Turkey, you could take a bus or taxi across the border into Syria and, with a little luck, find some moderate rebel fighters to follow.

Some of the larger news organizations set policies against using freelancers in conflict zones like Syria to discourage reckless behavior and avoid liability. Others wouldn’t send freelancers in but would buy stories from them once they were there, even if they wouldn’t always cover all of their expenses. Foley scraped by writing and shooting video for the GlobalPost and Agence France-Presse.

He worked mostly out of the embattled Syrian city Aleppo, a hotly contested front in the civil war. The group that would come to be known as ISIS did not yet exist. But with the help of an influx of foreign fighters from Iraq, the radical militants were quickly overtaking the more moderate rebels. The country was growing more dangerous. As it did, Foley’s tolerance for risk, combined with the lack of institutional constraints — no editor could tell him not to go somewhere — gave him a competitive advantage.

When he was kidnapped in the fall of 2012, he and his traveling companion, a British photojournalist, were headed back to Turkey. They were just 40 minutes from the border when they stopped briefly at an Internet cafe to file their stories and pictures. It was there that they were probably spotted by the man responsible for the ambush of their taxi soon after.

It’s hard not to wonder whether things might have played out differently if Foley had better resources. What if he had been traveling with security? Or in an armored vehicle instead of a taxi? If he’d had the proper technology to upload the files himself, would he even have needed to stop at that Internet cafe?

It’s hard not to ask a larger, more existential question too: Foley watched Hammerl die amid a hail of bullets that could just as easily have killed him. He was imprisoned for six weeks in Libya. He was, at the time of his capture, 39 and barely scratching out a living in a profession with ever-diminishing prospects. Why put himself through it?

Chris Hedges, a former war correspondent for The New York Times, offers one answer in his book “War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning,” writing that “the rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction.”

That’s surely part of it, but there’s something else, too. At Foley’s memorial, a local pastor, Rev. Paul Gousse, repeated what Foley told him right before he left for Syria: “The world needs to know the plight of the little people who are walked upon like grass.”

After the lunch, I went out for coffee with Clare Gillis, a freelance writer who was captured with Foley in Libya. She, too, had gone home when they were freed, but also soon returned to the Middle East and is now based out of Cairo. “Freelance journalism is not a job,” she told me. “It’s a dangerous and expensive hobby.”

When I dropped her back at the church to meet her parents, who had driven up from New Haven to see her and attend the service, I asked how long she planned to be in the States. She said she was leaving the next day. She had to get back to line up assignments for a reporting trip to Iraq.