Greste is normally based in the Kenyan capital of Nairobi; he had been in Egypt for two weeks of a three-week stint, filling in for a colleague during the Christmas period.

With the smoggy Cairo skyline behind him, he spoke of the hundreds of people that had been arrested in the previous days as police swept through the streets looking for protesters.

On December 24, the military-backed government had declared the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organisation. Only six months earlier, the Brotherhood had been the country's ruling party under elected president Mohamed Mursi.

On screen, Greste said it wasn't clear who had been taken into custody - whether they were Muslim Brotherhood members, sympathisers, or simply bystanders - but all faced up to five years in jail. Their fate would now depend on the judges, he said: ''It does look pretty draconian.''

He was broadcasting from the balcony of the Marriott Hotel, where the television network had established a makeshift office. The next night, Egyptian authorities raided it.

They arrested Greste, along with Cairo bureau chief Mohamed Fahmy and producer Baher Mohamed. The three have now been imprisoned for 66 days. Their fate, too, now rests with the judges.

The journalists have been accused of conspiring with the Muslim Brotherhood, broadcasting false news to undermine state security, and working without accreditation. Fahmy - who is a dual citizen of Egypt and Canada - and Mohamed are also accused of being members of the Brotherhood. All have pleaded not guilty.

The managing director of Al Jazeera English, Al Anstey, describes the charges as ''baseless, unacceptable and wholly unjustified''.

''What is going on in Egypt right now is a trial of journalism itself, so it is critical that we remain resolute in calling for freedom of speech … and for the immediate release of all of Al Jazeera's journalists,'' he says.

The jailing of his employees has been reported all over the world, but in Egypt, it is only one incident among many of journalists in trouble. The Committee to Protect Journalists, a New York-based advocacy group, says press freedom in Egypt has declined there more rapidly than in any other country.

Attacks on reporters rose under Mursi's presidency and continued after the military-backed government took power in July. In 2013, half a dozen journalists were killed, dozens were detained and scores were assaulted. Al Jazeera was one of 11 news outlets raided.

Robert Mahoney, the committee's assistant director, says a climate of state and self-censorship has taken hold.

In that, Egypt is far from alone. The committee recently released its annual risk list, which highlighted increasing violence against journalists in Bangladesh and Russia, and new legislation stifling free speech in Ecuador, Liberia, Russia, Vietnam and Zambia.

In Hong Kong, too, the committee says ''media freedom is at a low point''. Last week, Kevin Lau Chun-to, former editor of the Ming Pao newspaper, was slashed with a meat cleaver, only days after thousands of people rallied against increasing censorship. His sacking as editor was one of the catalysts for the protest.

In 1992, the committee began closely tracking the number of journalists killed around the world. Its tally is now 1044. Other advocates, such as the International News Safety Institute and the International Federation of Journalists, put the number significantly higher.

Until World War II, such fatalities were almost unheard of, but since the 1960s, the number of journalists killed in conflict has risen steeply.

Imprisonment and kidnappings are also at record levels. More than 200 journalists spent the New Year languishing in jail - the second highest on the committee's records, after 2012.

Mahoney says 80 journalists were kidnapped in Syria alone last year. About 30 of them are still being held.

''We've seen kidnappings in conflicts before - in certain parts of Somalia, in Afghanistan and Pakistan - but we haven't seen anything on this scale.''

Renowned photojournalist Robert Capa's most famous photograph, Falling Soldier, shows a Spanish republican fighter with one arm flung back, gun in hand, collapsing at the moment of his death. It was shot in 1936.

Capa would cover five wars before a landmine killed him in Vietnam in 1954 during the French Indochina war. By then, he had redefined conflict reporting.

''Capa put himself in a new position - between troops and incoming fire - often shooting fear's effect on faces, or the fire's effect on bodies,'' says American journalist Frank Greve, who has written about the history of reporters' deaths in combat. ''After Capa, anything less was kind of boring.''

Capa was one of the first journalists to sidestep tight military control and censorship. Given that freedom, he took risks that few had taken before.

But since then, those risks have grown in number and intensity. As communications technology has become much cheaper and faster, newsrooms and the public want the news with equal rapidity.

Warfare too has changed, Greve says. Reporters can find it hard to predict where bullets will come from, and they can't rely on combatants viewing them as impartial observers.

The reporters, photographers and citizen journalists in Syria today still produce work with Capa's ''hot immediacy'', Greve says, ''but I suspect they spend more time risking their lives than he did.''

Dr Colleen Murrell is a former international news editor - she worked with Greste at the BBC in the early 1990s. Now a journalism academic at Deakin University, Murrell researches the way foreign correspondents operate.

She says postings with a foreign bureau are the most coveted in the industry. Travelling to a danger zone has always been a way for young reporters to get a break. More people are now trying their luck, but they're doing so at the same time that those jobs are vanishing.

On-staff reporters always had the benefit of insurance, safety training and gear, and a support network if things went wrong. ''Now it's a lot more dangerous for a larger number of people,'' Murrell says.

Indeed, over the past two decades, a growing proportion of journalists killed on the job have been freelancers. But Murrell says they're beginning to organise. There are more than 4000 members of The Vulture Club, a hidden Facebook group where people exchange tips on safe border crossings, reliable interpreters and local conditions. Likewise, the Frontline Club - a London-based network of foreign correspondents - recently established a freelance register and support collective.

Murrell says these two groups have also been pushing international media companies to take greater responsibility - either by not encouraging freelance contributors to go to dangerous places, or, if they do go, by ensuring they're equipped to deal with the risks.

In the past decade, foreign journalists have increasingly become targets. Even so, nine out of 10 reporters are killed in their own country. Most of the deaths are murders, not casualties of war.

''Local journalists are murdered because they're rummaging around in stories people don't want aired,'' Mahoney says. ''That's always been the case.

''What's even worse is that nine out of 10 of those murders go unpunished. When you don't address the problem of impunity, journalists stop writing stories because they think they're going to get killed for it.''

Last year, the United Nations General Assembly voted to establish an annual ''International Day to End Impunity'' for crimes against journalists, to be held on November 2.

Mahoney acknowledges that drug cartels, corrupt officials and authoritarian regimes are oblivious to such measures, but he says they're worth pursuing. Some countries with many unsolved murders of journalists, such as Mexico, Brazil and India, are sensitive to international pressure.

''This is human rights work,'' he says. ''It's long, it's slow, and it's a hard slog.''

Last Thursday, protesters gathered in more than 30 cities in support of Peter Greste and the other Al Jazeera journalists. The event was part of a huge campaign for their release, which has played out most publicly on Twitter, where it has attracted hundreds of thousands of hits.

Thousands of people, including many prominent journalists, have posed for photos with their mouths taped shut. In Sydney's Martin Place, the federal secretary of the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance, Chris Warren, called on Prime Minister Tony Abbott to appeal directly to the Egyptian President. But Foreign Affairs Minister Julie Bishop doesn't believe that would help secure Greste's release.

''The advice I have received from other governments in the region is that we should not seek to humiliate the Egyptian authorities; we should seek to work as assiduously as possible behind the scenes,'' she says.

''There's a whole other issue about journalists facing significant risks in places of conflict and tension. I understand all of that, but my focus right now is to get Mr Greste home as soon as possible.''

Bishop says consular officials have met several times with the 48-year-old and his family, and also with Egyptian prosecutors. She had spoken directly with the Foreign Minister, Nabil Fahmy, but last week the entire Egyptian cabinet resigned.

The Greste family is keenly aware of the fragility of the Egyptian state - after all, that's why Peter was called in to report from Cairo. His parents, Lois and Juris, live in the Brisbane suburb of Sherwood. They spoke to him on Christmas Day. ''He was pretty cautious about going out on the streets, even at that time,'' Lois says.

Greste has covered conflicts in the Middle East and worked as a correspondent in Latin America and Africa.

''He's no cowboy journalist,'' Juris says. ''He's got a background of dealing with really tough situations.''

In 2005, Greste's producer, Kate Peyton, was shot and killed in Somalia while the pair were standing outside a hotel. He returned six years later and his report for the BBC from the streets of Mogadishu won a prestigious Peabody Award.

Al Jazeera has published two letters Greste wrote from prison in January. He described his broadcasts from Cairo as ''some pretty mundane reporting''.

At first, after he was arrested, he hoped the authorities would understand he was caught up in a political struggle that was not his own. The Egyptian government believes the Qatari broadcaster - especially its Arabic channel - promotes the Muslim Brotherhood.

But as the days passed, Greste realised that, amid the broader crackdown on dissent, his arrest was not a mistake. One part of the struggle was his: ''As a journalist, I am committed to defending a fundamental freedom of the press that no one in my profession can credibly work without,'' he wrote.

''How do you accurately and fairly report on Egypt's ongoing political struggle without talking to everyone involved?''

His brother, Andrew, has travelled to Cairo to support him, but despite several visits to Tora Prison, his family remains unsure about what will happen when their son returns to court today. The processes of the Egyptian legal system, and even the charges Greste faces, seem unclear.

''You try to not build up too much hope,'' Lois says, ''but you can't help but build a little bit.''

Michael Green is a Melbourne journalist.