She is the International Editor for Channel 4 News, and has reported from six continents, including coverage of the major conflicts in Syria, Iraq, Kosovo, Rwanda and Ukraine in the past two decades.

[4] Hilsum is author of the books Sandstorm: Libya in the Time of Revolution (2012) and In Extremis: The Life and Death of the War Correspondent Marie Colvin (2018).

She is the recipient of several awards, among which are the Patron's Medal from the Royal Geographical Society in 2017,[5] and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in the biography category for In Extremis.

When deciding what is acceptable to broadcast from conflict zones, she argues that the crucial question is whether "you are using those images as propaganda, or whether you are using them to try and tell people the truth about war".

She concedes that this "is a very difficult thing to get right", but is emphatic that it is not the place of a foreign correspondent to manipulate emotive images "to make a political point".