BRUSSELS - Fewer reporters were killed worldwide in 2010 than in the previous year, but media advocacy groups have warned that while the number slain in war zones has fallen, criminals and traffickers have become a greater threat to journalists.

Fifty-seven reporters were killed around the world this year, the Paris-based media advocacy group Reporters Without Borders said Thursday in its annual report, down 25 percent from 2009, when 76 journalists were killed in connection with their jobs.

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Last year's record number of deaths was high because of a massacre in the Philippines that saw more than two dozen journalists and their staff gunned down.

A separate report Thursday from the Brussels-based International Federation for Journalists said 94 journalist and other media personnel were killed in 2010, down from 139 in 2009. The federation count includes other employees of media organizations such as drivers, cameramen or producers.

The insurgency in Pakistan claimed the most victims in 2010, according to both groups. Other dangerous beats included the drug war in Mexico and political unrest in Honduras. Iraq, the Philippines, and Somalia also ranked high.

Media advocates stressed that while massacres like the one in the Philippines or the war in Iraq have pushed up the death toll in recent years, the number of journalists killed in domestic political conflicts has reached an alarmingly high level.

"This year, most of the journalists were killed in countries that cannot be called countries at war, I mean not in the traditional sense of a war," Jean-Francois Julliard, the secretary general of Reporters Without Borders, told APTN. "We have the feeling that murderers of journalists are among organized crime gangs, mafia, militias rather than in conflict zones."