The UNs Jan Egeland bemoaned much world coverage of disasters as a lottery in a keynote speech at the 2006 Newsxchange conference in Turkey last week.
Some disasters get a lot of headlines; others get little attention. Sometimes its easy to guess why one story or another grabbed world attention; other times it is much harder to understand. Reuters AlertNet, the humanitarian news portal run by Reuters Foundation, has a World Press Tracker that follows how a sampling of the worlds press covers disasters and emergencies.
The Tsunami disaster of 2004 grabbed the headlines as it occurred suddenly and shockingly just after Christmas; it affected areas where many tourists had still and video cameras to record the destruction; it hit places well-known as tourist spots.
Emergencies that grind on rather than occurring in an instant or those that happen in areas off the well-travelled news routes have a much harder time making it onto front pages or into top-ten lists.
Thankfully, The Long Tail is a phenomenon that has applicability in news as well there are many places on the web where you can find detailed information about many of the lesser-known, but heart-rending and important disasters. One place to start is this index providing facts and news about many world crises.
So maybe Jan Egeland is half right it is a bit of a lottery to get on the front pages or into the top-10 lists of news stories. But in fact there is a lot of information out there; you just have to look. And you have to be interested.
Like so much in news, coverage of emergencies is both push and pull. News organizations can push the stories we think are important and interesting. But what is really important is for the audience to reach out and read what is important and interesting to it.
David Schlesinger is Reuters Global Managing Editor
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Score one for diplomacy, I guess, but Reuters of all places ought to be able to shrug off the notion that coverage is a lottery.
Every correspondent has a story about someone who wanted something covered and didn’t understand why it didn’t rise to a minimal threshold. But however you attack or defend it, news editing philosophy is always based on what consumers want.
Sure, U.S. news consumers are especially parochial and ought to eat more servings of vegetables than dessert. Does anybody seriously believe that there is so little actually going on in the world that MSNBC-TV has had to cover the US election to the exclusion of all else for the past few days? Is it surprising that Gannet’s major strategic shift isn’t toward in-depth coverage of Darfur, but data mining community message boards (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ntent/article/2006/11/06/AR2006110601142 .html)?
Even news professionals have a limited appetite. When I was training American’s Deskers in Washington to post to the original reuters.com which was permitted to have only five (5) stories at a time! each of these seasoned editors, who handled dozens of stories a day, belittled our tiny news hole. I would ask each of them how many stories from the day before they remembered (3 or 4, without exception) and how many of those they still cared about (0 or 1, without exception) and that was the end of that.
So, what should resonate vs. what resonates? Those who respond correctly are apt to be around long enough to help write the history of this next decade of Internet news. Those who do not will soon be writing pious memoirs that people will also not read.
- Posted by John C Abell