Bramwell Ryan is a journalist, writer, award-winning photographer and author. An honours graduate in broadcast journalism and past editor of four magazines, publisher of a national newspaper, founder of several communication and media companies and a successful freelancer.

Key stats – written more than 4,000 articles, covered many international disasters, traveled to 60 countries and is a multi-platform content pioneer. He has taught media production throughout North America and in South Asia.

Here is some of what he has done over the years… much of it while chasing stories for magazines, newspapers, radio and television:

• Paid eight bribes on an eleven hour car trip in Russia
• Tripped over a skull in a Haitian cemetery
• Stuck for three weeks in the most top secret military base in North America where smoking was only allowed inside the buildings
• Chased cattle rustlers on the Swiss-French border
• Smuggled into Chechnya when journalists were forbidden
• Trapped in a canoe with an effete photographer while being chased by a bull moose
• Watched 24 people get death sentences from The Salvation Army in rural Zambia
• Scraped mold from my toothbrush in Nicaragua
• Bypassed government internet control in Tunisia to get email
• Underwear stolen in Trieste
• Danced at a gypsy celebration of a corrupt judge in Turkey
• Proved an $11,000 camera can bounce on a Mozambique runway
• Rode the morning garbage truck for street people in Toronto
• In the Wadi Rum desert in Jordan, explained to a 10-year-old the merits of having two wives
• Helped wrestle a caribou into a rubber boat in northern Quebec

Bram believes there will always be a role for those who report, sift, link, aggregate, edit and collaborate and that role is filled by journalists. That is key to the ethos of Dispatches.