Derrick Shore was nervous when he travelled with Laura Ling to the shantytowns of Sao Paulo, Brazil, several years ago.

Both worked for Channel One and were reporting on the dangerous slums for a series on urbanisation. Shore was the panicked reporter and Ling the calm producer.

“We had a driver who thought we were crazy that we were even thinking of going into” the area, Shore recalled. “And here she is, this little girl, this fearless producer.”

Shore and others who have worked with Ling during her years at Channel One and later at Current TV describe a bold and hardworking journalist who is both personable and empathetic. They say those traits served her in her work, including the human trafficking story she was reporting on when she and colleague Euna Lee were arrested in March by North Korean forces.

Ling, 32, and Lee, 36, who work for San Francisco-based Current TV, were convicted by North Korea’s Central Court of an undefined “grave crime” against the regime and sentenced on Monday to 12 years of hard labour.

Both women work in Current’s Vanguard journalism department — Ling as vice-president and correspondent and Lee as a film editor — and are based in Los Angeles.

It is not clear whether they ever entered North Korean territory before being arrested. The families have emphasised that when Ling and Lee left the US, they had no intention of entering North Korea.

Lee, the mother of a four-year-old, is an uncommonly kind and caring person, current and former colleagues said. “She was working to help out the team when she went to China because she was the only person on the team who spoke Korean,” a colleague said.

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