I just posted about a report that was critical of aid agencies' responses to the tsunami disaster. And within that report is a section on 'selling' forgotten disasters to the news media.
Here's the highlight reel:
Tricks of the trade: how to 'sell’ forgotten emergencies
According to analysis of 200 English-language newspapers worldwide, the tsunami generated more column inches in six weeks than the world’s top 10 ‘forgotten’ emergencies combined over the previous year.
The media blitz prompted unprecedented generosity. By February 2005, the international community had donated US$ 500 per person affected by the tsunami, compared to just 50 cents for each person affected by Uganda’s 18-year war.
How can aid agencies boost the media visibility of long-term, complex emergencies? Here are some practical tips:
Invest in media relations, communications training and expertise, down to the local level.
I found most of the chapter's excerpt to be fairly common-sense stuff and a rational analysis of the way today's media works. Here are some other points of interest:
News is often a numbers game. NGOs need to supply journalists with good data. Mortality surveys by one US NGO in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) found that 3.8 million people had died since 1998 from war, disease and malnutrition. Even so, coverage of the crisis remained patchy: “one of the worst sins of omission in media history”, admits the BBC’s Fergal Keane.
The obstacles to reporting Congo’s war include huge distances, random and sporadic fighting, and complex politics. Correspondents made more headway when the conflict converged around specific locations (e.g. Bunia in 2003) or issues (e.g. child soldiers, rape). Ironically, the dramatic eruption of DRC’s Nyiragongo volcano in January 2002 prompted a huge influx of journalists, but killed fewer than 100 people. ...Furthermore, aid organizations have to exploit digital communications technology, by making photos, video and audio available to journalists lacking the budgets for field trips. Digital technology greatly facilitated TV coverage of the Darfur crisis during 2004. “Store-and-forward” digital compression has revolutionised TV news coverage from remote areas by allowing high-quality video to be sent on a narrow-band satellite phone call. NGO press officers organizing field visits for TV crews could take advantage of this. For bringing hidden crises to light, television is the key medium.
However, too much TV coverage brings its own dilemmas. An agile 24/7 media, projecting the full emotional impact of sudden disaster into living rooms within hours, fuels both public funding and the demand for instant action. This can prompt high-profile aid interventions that aren’t based on sound needs assessments. ...
Another result of high-profile coverage is the prospect of raising too much money. MSF France closed its tsunami appeal on 3rd January, after raising six times more in a week that it had raised for Darfur in two months. Some organizations admitted they would have trouble spending all the money responsibly.
According to one aid worker in Sri Lanka, “Someone needs to ask whether it was really necessary to air-freight bottled water into the tsunami zone from Europe.” After all, principles of aid demand that disaster response should build on local capacities. ...
Some media trends actually favour humanitarians: the growing prominence of climate change, technical advances in video newsgathering, the rise of Africa as a geopolitical issue, posited links between poverty and terrorism, growth of peer-to-peer media and the approach of the 2015 millennium development goals. The Internet and 24-hour news have vastly increased the market for humanitarian testimony.
But NGOs must position themselves to capitalize on these trends, to think in terms of minutes not days; cultivate specialist correspondents; exploit new technology; develop solid media skills; issue fewer press releases and hold more press conferences; offer more field-based observations and fewer opinions.
Above all, humanitarian organizations must generate better content. Humanitarian communicators need to focus on human stories, because that is what audiences respond to. The closer their content resembles journalism or research, the more notice journalists – and the public – will take; the closer it resembles public relations, the less notice they will take.