Humanitarian Journalists

Front matter

Humanitarian Journalists

Covering Crises from a Boundary Zone

MARTIN SCOTT, KATE WRIGHT, AND MEL BUNCE

Contents

List of figures ix List of tables xi Preface xiii Acknowledgements XV List of abbreviations xvii Introduction: Who are humanitarian journalists? 1 1 Making news in a boundary zone 19

2 Insiders and outsiders: Peripheral, precarious and constructive watchdogs 44

3 Adding value, amplifying marginalised voices and covering under-reported crises 6l 4 Fifty shades of humanitarianism 85 5 Is humanitarian journalism a field-in-the-making? 99 Concluding remarks 111

Preface

Sophia! is a humanitarian journalist. She works for a small non-profit news outlet that covers international aid and global affairs. She regularly reports on under-reported crises, with a focus on in-depth, explanatory and solutions-oriented journalism. She is particularly keen to highlight the perspective not only of affected citizens but also of a range of other local actors including rebels, aid workers, politicians and think-tanks. She has significant freedom to choose which stories to cover and how to report them and regularly commissions local stringers living in affected countries.

Sophia used to work for a large international news broadcaster. Despite having a permanent position and a significantly higher salary, she left after just 18 months because she was frustrated by what she felt was their rigid and formulaic approach to covering global affairs. She thought that much of their coverage of recent humanitarian crises was superficial and fleeting. Although she was proud that she helped to break a news story revealing corruption within an international NGO, she worries that it unfairly damaged the reputation of the humanitarian sector as a whole, because some of the subtleties of international humanitarian response got lost in the reporting.

The news organisation Sophia works for now generates very little advertising or reader revenue and relies almost exclusively on short-term grant funding from a very small number of private foundations. Although she has never felt under any pressure to cover stories in ways that might please their current or potential donors, she does resent the amount of time it takes to meet their reporting requirements. If their funding is cut, and she loses her job, she intends to work either as a freelance journalist or as an aid agency press officer. The only other news outlet she is aware of that covers similar stories has recently closed due to a lack of funding.

xiv Preface

Sophia has never actually met any of her current colleagues in person as they all work remotely, in different countries. During their daily online editorial meetings they frequently disagree about which stories fall within their remit. There is no consensus about what makes a story ‘humanitarian’, as opposed to a human rights or global development issue, for example. For this reason, some of the stories she pitches still get rejected — and she doesn’t fully understand why.

Although Sophia was recently nominated for a One World Media award, in general, she is frustrated by the lack of recognition and reach of her work. She also worries about being able to pay the bills — she knows her job is precarious. But despite this lack of external recognition and the financial risks, Sophia is glad she took this job — because it allows her the freedom to do the kind of work she has always wanted to do.

Sophia is one of a small group of ‘humanitarian journalists’ whose work bridges the worlds of international news production and humanitarianism. She is motivated by both the traditional journalistic desire to document, witness and explain events and the desire to help alleviate suffering and save lives. There are a small number of news outlets employing humanitarian journalists like Sophia, who play a valuable role in the global media system. This book is about those individuals. It seeks to describe, explain and evaluate their work.

Note

1 ‘Sophia’ is a fictional journalist, constructed in ways which illustrate key themes in our findings (see KotiSova 2019 for an illustration of how creative non-fiction can be used to study crisis reporting).

Acknowledgements

The idea for this book originated on Thursday 27 March 2014, when we saw an online petition urging then UN Secretary General Ban Kimoon to ‘Save IRIN, a UN-established, award-winning A frica-based news network’ (Francesca 2014). According to the petition, journalists at IRIN (which later became The New Humanitarian) produced ‘vital... humanitarian journalism’ on a ‘microscopic budget’ using their ‘unique skills and access’, at a time of ‘unprecedented political upheavals and conflict’. Despite this, ‘IRIN’s parent organization in the UN has decided to wind it down’.

This immediately prompted a range of questions, not only about why the UN was ‘shut[ting] it down’ — but more broadly about what ‘unique skills’ IRIN’s journalists might have and how their reporting might differ from more conventional news coverage of humanitarian affairs? What other, similar sources of “humanitarian reporting’ might there be, if any? In short, who are humanitarian journalists? We were only able to begin answering these questions because the senior management of IRIN at the time — Ben Parker and Heba Aly — agreed to let us observe and interview their staff, as they transitioned away from the UN.

Since then, over 150 people have agreed to be interviewed for this research. This includes representatives of UN agencies, governmental and philanthropic donors, INGOs and intermediary organisations, as well as journalists working for Agence France-Presse (AFP), Al Jazeera English, Associated Press, BBC World Service, the BBC, BRIGHT Magazine, Buzzfeed, CGTN, Channel 4 News, CNN, Devex, El Pais, Goats and Soda (NPR), The Guardian, HumAngle, Humanosphere, India Blooms, Inter Press Service, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, ITN, Just Earth News, the New York Times, News Deeply, Nuba Reports, PassBlue, Pro Publica, ReliefWeb, Reuters, SciDev.Net, Sky News, The New Humanitarian (formerly IRIN), xvi Acknowledgements the Thomson Reuters Foundation, UN Dispatch, Vice News, Voice of America, Washington Post, World Post and Xinhua. We are extremely grateful to all of our interviewees for how generously they shared their time, thoughts and experiences.

We are also grateful to those who have supported us in other aspects of this research including research assistants Jessie Hagen and Fiona Elliot, mentors Dan Brockington and Sally-Ann Wilson, transcriber Georgie Aronin, designer Emma Bailey and our Commissioning Editor at Routledge Suzanne Richardson. We also wish to thank those who have given us feedback on the ideas discussed in this book including Alexandra Budabin, Lilie Chouliaraki, Florencia Enghel, Alice Fenyoe, Jonathan Ong, Shani Orgad, Lisa Ann Richey, Alexa Robertson, Ludek Stavinoha and Nikki Usher — who first introduced us to the work of Gil Eyal and Grace Pok. Thanks also to Monika Krause and Peter English for giving us permission to reproduce their Figures in this book.

This book is one part of our wider Humanitarian Journalism Research Project, which was initially supported by a grant from the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (grant number AH/ N00731X/1). Since then, our research has also been supported by the Independent Social Research Foundation (ISRF), as well as by institutional funding from our respective universities — the University of East Anglia (UEA), the University of Edinburgh and City, University of London. All our publications from this wider research project are available open access and can be found at humanitarian-journalism. net.

Finally, as always, we are grateful to our friends and families for their support and patience. Since we began this project, working conditions in Higher Education have deteriorated, making long-term collaborative research projects increasingly challenging. These difficulties were further compounded by the effects of the Covid pandemic. Given this, the support of our friends, families and colleagues has been invaluable. Thank you.

Abbreviations

Agence France Presse

Associated Press

British Broadcasting Corporation

China Global Television Network News Development Assistance Committee Financial Tracking Service

International Committee of the Red Cross International non-governmental organisation Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Integrated Regional Information

Networks (now The New Humanitarian) Médecins Sans Frontières Non-Governmental Organisation

National Public Radio

New World Information and Communication Order The New Humanitarian

nited Nations

nited Nations Educational, Scientific

and Cultural Organization

United Nations Office for the

Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs

U U

Taylor & Francis Taylor & Francis Group http://taylorandfrancis.com

Introduction Who are humanitarian journalists?

Prior to the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, the armed conflict in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions was the second most underreported humanitarian crisis in the world (see Figure 0.1). In 2021, it was the subject of just 801 online news articles globally, out of over 1.8 million articles analysed by Care International (2022).' In 2020, it received even less media attention — just 702 articles (Care International 2021). During this time, around 3.4 million people in eastern Ukraine needed humanitarian assistance, including 1.3 million elderly people (OCHA 2022).

Other consistently ‘forgotten’ crises include the 1.2 million people in Zambia experiencing acute levels of food insecurity, which received

No. of news articles 500,000 + A

Figure 0.1 Volume of online news coverage of the 40 largest humanitarian crises in 2021.

Source: Data provided by Care International and Meltwater. See Chapter Notes for a Full list of data.

just 512 online news reports in 2021; and the 2.8 million people in need of humanitarian aid in Honduras, because of chronic poverty and violence, which received just 3,920 online news articles in 2021 (Care International 2022). To put these figures in context, during the same period, there were 91,979 online articles globally about the announcement that actors Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez were dating again, and 239,422 news articles about billionaires Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk taking space flights (ibid).

However, not all humanitarian crises are ‘forgotten’. Figure 0.1 also shows that a small number receive considerably more attention than most others. For example, in 2021, the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan was the subject of nearly half a million (475,744) online news items — more than 33 other crises combined. Similarly, in 2022, the war in Ukraine drew a vast amount of international media attention. At its peak, it was the subject of 35% of all online global news coverage (see Alexander and Rozzell 2022).

Such extreme disparities in media attention are a longstanding and well-documented feature of international news coverage and the result of conventional journalistic norms and practices, as well as structural influences. Research has repeatedly demonstrated that the volume of international news coverage a humanitarian crisis receives is primarily a reflection of its geo-political significance and its resonance with journalistic news values — rather than the number of people affected (Kwak and An 2014; Yan and Bissell 2015). Adams (1986:113), for example, found that ‘the severity of foreign natural disasters explains less than 10% of the variation in the amount of attention they are given in nightly U.S. television newscasts’. Instead, as Franks (2006:284) put it, ‘Western self-interest is the precondition for significant coverage of a humanitarian crisis’.

These disparities in media attention — and this disconnect with levels of suffering — have important consequences. They can compound the limited international political attention that most crises receive, because politicians are under less pressure to act (Hawkins 2011; Brommesson and Ekengren 2017). The under-reporting of humanitarian crises can also exacerbate disparities in the amount of funding they receive from international donors (Cohen, Riffe and Kim 2021). For example, our own research recently demonstrated that a large amount of sudden-onset, national news coverage can pressure governments to allocate greater support to a humanitarian crisis — even if the level of unmet need does not require it (Scott, Bunce and Wright 2022).

More broadly, these acute disparities in media attention reproduce a ‘hierarchy of human life’ in which some people’s lives are represented as more worthy of attention than others, which ultimately helps to fuel prejudice and injustices (Chouliaraki 2006; Joye 2009). For instance, in May 2022, while 91% of UK adults were aware of the war in Ukraine, just 23% were aware of the humanitarian crisis in the Horn of Africa, which was affecting almost 20 million people (Davies 2022).

But the episodic and selective nature of conventional news coverage of humanitarian crises is only one part of a bigger and largely untold story about the relationship between journalism and humanitarianism. In this book, we show that there are a small but influential number of humanitarian journalists who defy many conventional journalistic norms. These humanitarian journalists work largely for specialist international news outlets such as Devex, HumAngle, India Blooms, Inter Press Service, Just Earth News, SciDev.Net, The New Humanitarian (formerly IRIN) and UN Dispatch.

In contrast to more conventional journalists, their professional practices are informed by hybrid combinations of journalistic and humanitarian principles. For example, their strong adherence to the humanitarian norm of ‘moral equivalence’ — the idea that all lives have equal worth — means that they continue to cover humanitarian crises even when these do not correspond with conventional news values. For instance, in 2021, when eastern Ukraine was almost entirely overlooked by most news outlets, The New Humanitarian continued to publish in-depth stories about the impact of the Covid pandemic on the conflict (Sopova and Taylor-Lind 2021), for example, and the inadequacies of mental health support for children affected by the war (Laichter 2021). Similarly, after the Russian invasion in 2022, when global media attention focused heavily on Ukraine, humanitarian journalists continued covering other ‘forgotten’ crises in Malawi, Guatemala, Burundi, Niger, Zimbabwe and elsewhere, which conventional news outlets were largely ignoring.

But reporting under-reported crises is not the only way humanitarian journalists’ professional practices differ from conventional journalism. We also show that the format of and sourcing practices within their coverage is distinct. Their adherence to the humanitarian principle of ‘moral equivalence’ leads them to amplify marginalised voices connected to humanitarian crises, such as affected citizens and local volunteers. For example, The New Humanitarian’s article about children’s mental health in eastern Ukraine in 2021 focused primarily on the testimonies of children themselves, along with their guardians, parents and grandparents (Laichter 2021).

By contrast, Lawson (2021) has shown that within conventional news coverage of humanitarian crises, there is an especially heavy reliance on a narrow range of institutional sources, such as the United Nations and large INGOs. This reliance on a ‘hierarchy of trustworthy sources’ (Lawson 2021:1) enables journalists to maintain the credibility of their work without the need to verify, contest and/or challenge the official information they cite. However, it also means that the international institutions they ‘hide behind’ (ibid) routinely become the ‘primary definers’ (Hall et al. 1978) of a crisis — that is, experts who have the power to frame and interpret events for the audience.

Such an approach is problematic because it often leads to coverage which emphasises the agency of international rescue efforts at the expense of affected communities and local response teams. It can also inhibit critical assessments of the international response and foreclose discussion of alternatives to humanitarian action, or alternative understandings of ‘humanitarianism’ itself (Hopgood 2008). In short, it can reproduce an apolitical view of humanitarian crises. For example, in their analysis of Spanish press coverage of the Darfur conflict, Gutiérrez and Garcia (2011) conclude that reporting not only privileged the perspective of European humanitarian organisations, but also drew attention to the consequences of events rather their causes, and presented Dafuris as playing a passive and secondary role.

In addition to ‘reporting under-reported crises’ and ‘amplifying marginalised voices’, humanitarian journalists seek to ‘add value’ to mainstream news coverage of humanitarian crises — in accordance with the humanitarian principle of ‘making the most difference’ (Krause 2014). This is usually achieved by providing longer-form, explanatory journalism and/or by experimenting with different formats. For example, in its coverage of humanitarian issues in Africa, HumAngle regularly makes use of infographics, cartoon illustrations, Twitter Space discussions, geospatial tools, explainer videos, documentaries, interactive dashboards and weekly podcasts. Humanitarian journalists are also often able to ‘add value’ through their reporting because they operate with a more informed understanding of humanitarian principles and the aid sector and have a more collaborative and outcome-oriented approach to their work. This often leads them to adopt the role of a constructive watchdog for the aid sector. For example, HumAngle recently collaborated with the Premium Times Centre for Investigative Journalism (PTCIJ) on a series of stories that uncovered corruption in the management of displaced people in Northeast Nigeria.

By contrast, previous research has consistently concluded that conventional news coverage of humanitarian crises frequently adopts the same ‘standard characteristics’ (Bacon and Nash 2004:19), and ‘ubiquitous... humanitarian imaginary’ (Stupart 2022:221). The main features of this ‘template’ of conventional humanitarian reporting are well characterised by Ardévol-Abreu (2016) who, in a study of Spanish press coverage of humanitarian crises, identified four dominant news frames — war, violence, Islamic terrorism and crime. Ardévol-Abreu (2016:49) also found that, despite their different editorial viewpoints, the use of these dominant frames showed ‘very little variation’ amongst the four newspapers studied. Ultimately, Ardévol-Abreu (2016) concluded that there is a dominant macro-frame of Spanish press coverage of humanitarian crisis which characterises such events as a threat to the ‘North’, produced by corruption, terrorism and political incompetence, which can only be resolved either by foreign military force or humanitarian assistance. Research shows that the repeated use of this dominant frame leads audiences to instinctively dismiss or actively avoid news coverage about distant suffering (Cohen 2001; VSO 2001; Scott 2018; Seu and Orgad 2017).

Despite its limitations, conventional journalistic approaches to covering humanitarian crises can still serve some important normative goals. They can increase international awareness and even charitable donations from the public for a small number of crises. For instance, in their study of media influence on charitable giving after the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, Brown and Minty (2006) found that an additional minute of nightly news coverage or an additional story in a major newspaper raised donations by between 17% and 21%, even when controlling for timings and tax considerations. Similarly, van Belle, Rioux and Potter (2004:134) found that one story about a foreign disaster in the New York Times is associated with an increase of more than US$375,000 in US foreign disaster assistance — even when its severity has been taken into account. Furthermore, Cooper (2020:747) has shown that legacy media were central to ensuring that the 2018 sexual abuse scandals concerning Oxfam GB and Save the Children UK — which had been known about for some years within the aid sector — finally received widespread attention.

Given this, we contend that conventional journalistic approaches are not inherently problematic, but that they can become so if they are the only way in which humanitarian affairs are reported. The contrasting coverage produced by humanitarian journalists therefore provides a valuable addition — especially at a time when a diverse range of critical and informed coverage of humanitarian affairs has never been more important. Climate change is causing widespread disruption in nature, affecting the lives of billions of people around the world.

Increased heatwaves, droughts and floods, for example, are exposing millions more people to acute food and water insecurity (IPCC 2022). In addition, the escalating and interacting impacts of biodiversity loss, forced migrations, increasingly protracted conflicts and global pandemics are collectively fuelling rapid increases in humanitarian need around the world.

In 2022, the UN requested $41 billion to help 183 million people in need across 63 countries — nearly double the amount requested in 2019, and three times the number of people in need than in 2015 (Alexander 2022; OCHA 2022). This expansion in humanitarian need is far outstripping levels of international humanitarian support — which is largely flatlining. In 2021, the gap between requirements and funding was the second largest ever, with the UN’s humanitarian response plans and appeals only 54% funded (FTS 2021). In this context, it is essential that journalism helps to support more effective, needs-based and accountable responses to humanitarian crises.

Despite producing valuable content, humanitarian journalists pay a heavy price for deviating from conventional journalistic norms. In this book, we also show that they occupy a peripheral position in both the journalistic and humanitarian fields and, as a result, they often suffer froma lack of recognition and financial security. This has direct implications for their work, especially their ability to act as ‘watchdogs’ of the aid sector. For this reason, we argue that humanitarian journalists need far greater support — but we caution against interventions which could compromise their unique journalistic-humanitarian values.

We also argue that humanitarian journalists help to challenge some of our longstanding assumptions about news coverage of humanitarian affairs. They demonstrate that the episodic, simplistic and selective nature of much news coverage of humanitarian crises is not inevitable. There is nothing intrinsically ‘un-newsworthy’ about humanitarian crises like those currently occurring in South Sudan, Somalia and Yemen. News values are socially constructed and while dominant interpretations of these values are often reproduced by news producers, we show that they are also routinely modified, adapted and challenged by others. In short, the news producers we study in this book show that another kind of humanitarian journalism is possible.

This critical review of the norms and values of humanitarian journalists also gives us an opportunity to re-think how professional fields in general constrain and enable different forms of practice. Throughout this book, we demonstrate that the practices of the humanitarian journalists in our study are an outcome of their social positioning vis-a-vis the fields of ‘journalism’ and ‘humanitarianism’. Specifically, we show that they are neither fully inside nor outside either field, but situated at the ‘thick boundary zone’ (Eyal 2013:170) between them. Following Eyal (2013:180), we show that this is an under-regulated ‘space of opportunity’ — characterised by ambiguity — which enables new forms of hybrid practice to emerge, as the norms and values from multiple fields meet.

This book also speaks to conversations about why journalists choose to engage in journalism, despite its rapidly decreasing symbolic and material rewards (Powers and Vera-Sembrano, forthcoming), and why some journalists choose to pursue particularly precarious, or poorly paid forms of reporting, in order to represent the suffering of others (Stupart 2020, 2021a, 2021b). Powers and Vera-Sembrano (forthcoming) outline various ‘modes of adjustment’ journalists engage in to hold onto what Bourdieu (1993) would call ilusio — that sense of why ‘the game of journalism’ is worth playing. We show that humanitarian journalists engage in a different ‘mode of adjustment’: trading in the symbolic or material capital they previously held within the journalistic or humanitarian fields, to have the freedom to produce the kinds of specialist reporting they enjoy, value and care passionately about in the ‘thick boundary zone’ between these fields.

Finally, we contribute to what Ferron, KotiSova and Smith (2022:3) describe as a ‘recent trend not to grant epistemic privilege to the mainstream news media, professional elites and their dominant metadiscourse and instead to investigate overlooked sub-groups and practice’. The world’s communications ecologies are rapidly changing and diversifying in response to economic and technological disruption, and the arrival of non-traditional actors including NGOs and citizens who make news content and, in doing so, blur the boundaries of who and what constitutes journalism. It is therefore important not to assume that the most significant professional practices are always those that have been firmly institutionalised (see Deuze and Witschge 2017). In particular, our research suggests that we might begin to consider journalistic ‘beats’ — not simply as thematically-defined subject areas of news coverage, but as potential ‘boundary zones’ between the journalistic and non-journalistic fields, where other potentially valuable, hybrid professional practices may be emerging. This might be equally true, for example, of other specialist areas such as business journalism or sports journalism.

In the remainder of this opening chapter, we explain who these humanitarian journalists are, and how we identified them and studied their practices, before giving a more detailed overview of the different chapters in this book.

8 Introduction: Who are humanitarian journalists? Finding humanitarian journalists

Identifying alternative ways of reporting humanitarian affairs — and the individuals and organisations who practice them — is surprisingly difficult. When we started this study in 2015, very few news outlets publicly identified themselves or their content as ‘humanitarian’. Furthermore, we wanted to avoid imposing our own definition of what ‘counts’ as humanitarian journalism because this might exclude some important practices, as well as risking ethnocentricity. We were acutely aware that the term ‘humanitarian’ is not only a ‘contested terrain’, but also something of a ‘sticky signifier, capable of holding on simultaneously to multiple discourses and meanings’ (Cottle and Cooper 2019:2). For example, there are longstanding tensions between the ‘chemical’ strand of humanitarianism, which seeks only to provide immediate relief to those who are suffering; and the ‘alchemical’ strand, which also tries to prevent suffering by challenging its structural causes of suffering (Barnett 2011; Orgad 2013). Moreover, we are mindful that the practice of calling oneself a ‘humanitarian journalist’ is, as we explain in more detail later, ‘rarely a neutral act of self-description. It is also a strategic move in a social game’ (Medvetz 2012:34).

We began this study, therefore, by casting a very wide net. In 2016, we commissioned the media monitoring service — Kantar—to carry out digital keyword searches of over 20,000 English-language news outlets, to identify all those that reported on four different ‘humanitarian’ events or issues. These events included a rapid-onset disaster (an earthquake), a UN appeal for humanitarian funding for multiple crises, a long-running and highly complex conflict (in South Sudan) and the first Global Humanitarian Summit, which focused on aid policy.”

We found that only 12 news outlets — or 0.0006% of the sample — covered all four events. As expected, this included major international news agencies such as Agence France Presse (AFP), Associated Press (AP), Thomson Reuters and the Xinhua News Agency — which many local and national news outlets rely on for their international reporting (Palmer 2019). Four of the largest international broadcasters also covered all four events, including Al Jazeera English, the BBC World Service, China Global Television Network news (CGTN) and Voice of America. So too did two relatively small, non-profit international news outlets — The New Humanitarian and Humanosphere.*

We began interviewing journalists from all 12 organisations and continued ‘snowballing’ to identify further journalists around the world who frequently reported internationally on humanitarian affairs. In total, we interviewed over 120 practicing journalists from 37 different news outlets between 2016 and 2020. During this time, we also interviewed 30 representatives of UN agencies, governmental and philanthropic donors, INGOs and intermediary organisations. In semi-structured interviews, we asked journalists about their news values, professional role perceptions, daily practices and how they related to those they reported on, their editors, audiences and funders. Many of these individuals shared the same, conventional journalistic norms and practices, and produced the kinds of conventional reporting on humanitarian crises that has been well documented in previous research, which we described above.

But crucially — and fascinatingly — we identified within this larger sample a significant number of individuals whose professional norms and practices consistently defied conventional journalistic norms. This smaller group of approximately 30 journalists are the primary focus of this book. These individuals worked primarily for international, online, non-profit news outlets — though many also work or have worked as freelancers. Few were employed by commercial, state, or public service news outlets. These specialist news organisations included BRIGHT Magazine, Devex, Goats and Soda (NPR), Humanosphere, HumAngle, India Blooms, Inter Press Service, Just Earth News, News Deeply, PassBlue, SciDev.Net, The New Humanitarian (formerly IRIN), UN Dispatch and WorldPost — though several of these outlets have since closed.

Despite having a much smaller reach than national and international broadcasters, these specialist news outlets are still highly influential. Those which directly target professionals working in the aid sector — such as Devex and The New Humanitarian — are heavily relied upon by this community for specialist information, analysis and investigations. Indeed, our survey of aid worker attitudes towards the media — which we cite throughout the book — showed that 39% of The New Humanitarian’s readers regard its journalism is ‘extremely’ or ‘very important’ to their work. Several of these organisations are also attached to larger news outlets, which syndicate their content to a much wider audience, such as Goats and Soda (NPR).

These specialist news outlets are also important because they tend to cover humanitarian affairs differently to national media and international broadcasters. We illustrate this point throughout the book, by drawing on the results of two separate content analyses: a study of news coverage of the 2015 Nepal earthquake by Reuters and The New Humanitarian, and an analysis of news coverage of humanitarian crises in Yemen and South Sudan in 2017 by Al Jazeera English, the BBC World Service, CGTN (Africa and Americas), CNN International, the Mail Online, Devex, The Guardian, The New Humanitarian and The Washington Post. In our study of coverage of the 2015 Nepal earthquake, for example, The New Humanitarian was found to cover a wider range of topics and to focus on the voice of affected citizens more often, with few efforts to dramatise events — compared to Reuters. Similarly, our analysis of reporting of Yemen and South Sudan showed that Devex’s coverage was very different from reporting by more mainstream news outlets, as it had a strong focus on economics and local/international businesses.

Despite their importance, the routines and practices operating within these specialist news outlets have not been studied before. Instead, previous research into international news coverage of humanitarian affairs has focused primarily on analysing the content of mainstream journalistic reporting, either in large international broadcasters (Franks 2006; Robertson 2015) or major national news outlets (Hawkins 2011; Yann and Bissell 2015; Ardévol-Abreu 2016; Zerback and Holzleitner 2017). These kinds of analyses can do much: helping us to identify a list of likely factors that influence coverage. But they cannot tell us how these factors interact with one another in different contexts, how they change over time and how they are influenced by other less readily observable or predictable dynamics such as access, safety concerns and relations with sources. In other words, studies of media content shed little light on how processes of news production and selection are constantly negotiated through the actions of particular journalists in specific circumstances.