We pay scant attention to reporters and journalists who fight two survival wars today. The first, which we cover a lot is about job security, as newsrooms shrink and the ‘business’ of news gets downgraded to meet the wave of web 2.0 content creation and consumption.

But methinks we –myself included– focus too much on this.

We celebrate people who blog-slash-report to the point of turning them into celebrities. Robert Scoble with his camera phone in Davos, streaming live ‘news’ and the power of YouTube and Google in news distribution.

But I bet many of the following names mean nothing to my readers. John Ray, J. S. Tissainayagam, Levent Ozturk, Jill Carroll, Hisham Michwit Hamdan, Alan Johnston … Google them and see if you are interested.

Johnston was captured in Gaza, and freed last year. He had a campaign going, and now a Wikipdia entry, but Tissanayagam doesn’t get that kind of attention.

If you want to see what risk means watch this video taken this week as Turkish journalist Ozturk and his crew are fired at covering the Russian invasion of Georgia.

Tissanayagam, a former Sunday Times journalist, is being held on a flimsy ‘prevention of terrorism’ charge by the Sri Lankan government. OK, he has a statutory banner, and a web site; Reporters without borders has been campaigning for his release. But to much of the western media, these journalists are invisible, and those who consume news ignore them in the same way they don’t notice the bylines.

Tissanayagam wasn’t carrying a camera into the warzone. The ‘risky business’ he engaged in? Managing a web site. That’s right, my friends, he is the sort of new media journalist that doesn’t get covered by new media journalism. He’s 161 days in detention, and counting.

And we just go on covering China, and how investigative reporting is so risky in an era of slashed budgets.