Doing Good and Looking Good in Global Humanitarian Reporting: Is Philanthrojournalism good news?

This chapter investigates if and how a private donor’s apparent motivation to ‘look good’ – or to generate symbolic capital – interacts with a news organization’s ability to ‘do good’ by producing public service content. We address this issue by reporting on the findings of a year-long study of the online humanitarian news organisation – IRIN – as it became primarily funded by a new donor. We argue that whilst it is possible that the Foundation’s pursuit of symbolic capital may have had some effect on how IRIN sought to ‘do good’, it did not appear to affect the extent to which IRIN was either willing or able to ‘do good’. Indeed, our analysis makes clear that the influence of the Foundation only had an effect on IRIN when it combined with other factors, especially journalists’ own values and organizational strategies. Ultimately, this case highlights the limits of generalized claims about the likely influence of a donor’s desire to ‘look good’ on a news organization

The State of Humanitarian Journalism

Humanitarian journalism plays a crucial role in how citizens, aid workers and international organisations around the world respond to emergencies and human suffering. Research on this journalism has tended to focus on establishing which topics and crises receive the most and least coverage. But researchers have not explored other important questions such as: how do different funding models for humanitarian journalism change the news that is produced? How do governments influence the international reporting of humanitarian issues? What news do citizens and aid workers want to see more of? This report starts to answer these questions with data from a large scale, four-year multi-country study of humanitarian journalists, the news they produce, and the audiences who consume it. This study includes interviews with nearly 200 journalists, news managers and media funders as well as extensive newsroom observations. This included fieldwork in London, Geneva, Washington, Bangkok and Nairobi. In addition, we completed major analyses of news content, and report on audience surveys with citizens and aid workers

Shining a Spotlight on Media Freedom: Media Coverage of the Global Campaign for Media Freedom

In our first project report, we analyse English-language, online news coverage and Twitter commentary about media freedom. Specifically, we ask whether the Global Campaign for Media Freedom (GCMF) has succeeded in ‘shining a spotlight’ on media freedom in its first year of activities, from July 2019- July 2020. Key Findings: *Media freedom receives more coverage than many other international human rights issues. However, this coverage has been in decline in recent years. It is also highly episodic and largely restricted to annual days / events and individual cases in which journalists are targeted or harmed. *In its first year, the GCMF has helped to shine a spotlight on media freedom, generating a significant amount of new, online, English-language news coverage and social media commentary. Notably, it generated more attention than most other international media freedom initiatives. *However, this spotlight was fleeting. Media attention was primarily focussed on the inaugural Global Media Freedom Conference in London in July 2019. The GCMF’s other initiatives generated much more limited coverage. *Media attention focused on well-known personalities associated with the campaign, especially Amal Clooney and the United Kingdom’s Foreign Secretary (at the time) Jeremy Hunt. *Disappointingly, George Clooney was also frequently mentioned in online news stories about the Global Campaign for Media Freedom (25%) – more mentions than even Jamal Khashoggi or the United Nations – despite not being involved in the campaign

Humanitarian Journalists:Covering Crises from a Boundary Zone

This book documents the unique reporting practices of humanitarian journalists – an influential group of journalists defying conventional approaches to covering humanitarian crises. Based on a 5-year study, involving over 150 in-depth interviews, this book examines the political, economic and social forces that sustain and influence humanitarian journalists. The authors argue that – by amplifying marginalised voices and providing critical, in-depth explanations of neglected crises – these journalists show us that another kind of humanitarian journalism is possible. However, the authors also reveal the heavy price these reporters pay for deviating from conventional journalistic norms. Their peripheral position at the ‘boundary zone’ between the journalistic and humanitarian fields means that a humanitarian journalist’s job is often precarious – with direct implications for their work, especially as ‘watchdogs’ for the aid sector. As a result, they urgently need more support if they are to continue to do this work and promote more effective and accountable humanitarian action. A rigorous study of how unique professional practices can be produced at the ‘boundary zone’ between fields, this book will interest students and scholars of journalism and communication studies, sociology and humanitarian studies. It will also appeal to those interested in studies of news and media work as occupational identities

Humanitarian Journalists

This book documents the unique reporting practices of humanitarian journalists – an influential group of journalists defying conventional approaches to covering humanitarian crises. Based on a 5-year study, involving over 150 in-depth interviews, this book examines the political, economic and social forces that sustain and influence humanitarian journalists. The authors argue that – by amplifying marginalised voices and providing critical, in-depth explanations of neglected crises – these journalists show us that another kind of humanitarian journalism is possible. However, the authors also reveal the heavy price these reporters pay for deviating from conventional journalistic norms. Their peripheral position at the ‘boundary zone’ between the journalistic and humanitarian fields means that a humanitarian journalist’s job is often precarious – with direct implications for their work, especially as ‘watchdogs’ for the aid sector. As a result, they urgently need more support if they are to continue to do this work and promote more effective and accountable humanitarian action. A rigorous study of how unique professional practices can be produced at the ‘boundary zone’ between fields, this book will interest students and scholars of journalism and communication studies, sociology and humanitarian studies. It will also appeal to those interested in studies of news and media work as occupational identities

Motion artifact cancellation in NIR spectroscopy using discrete Kalman filtering

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>As a continuation of our earlier work, we present in this study a Kalman filtering based algorithm for the elimination of motion artifacts present in Near Infrared spectroscopy (NIR) measurements. Functional NIR measurements suffer from head motion especially in real world applications where movement cannot be restricted such as studies involving pilots, children, etc. Since head movement can cause fluctuations unrelated to metabolic changes in the blood due to the cognitive activity, removal of these artifacts from NIR signal is necessary for reliable assessment of cognitive activity in the brain for real life applications.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Previously, we had worked on adaptive and Wiener filtering for the cancellation of motion artifacts in NIR studies. Using the same NIR data set we have collected in our previous work where different speed motion artifacts were induced on the NIR measurements we compared the results of the newly proposed Kalman filtering approach with the results of previously studied adaptive and Wiener filtering methods in terms of gains in signal to noise ratio. Here, comparisons are based on paired t-tests where data from eleven subjects are used.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The preliminary results in this current study revealed that the proposed Kalman filtering method provides better estimates in terms of the gain in signal to noise ratio than the classical adaptive filtering approach without the need for additional sensor measurements and results comparable to Wiener filtering but better suitable for real-time applications.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>This paper presented a novel approach based on Kalman filtering for motion artifact removal in NIR recordings. The proposed approach provides a suitable solution to the motion artifact removal problem in NIR studies by combining the advantages of the existing adaptive and Wiener filtering methods in one algorithm which allows efficient real time application with no requirement on additional sensor measurements.</p

The influence of news coverage on humanitarian aid: The bureaucrats’ perspective

We examine if and how news coverage influences governments’ humanitarian aid allocations, from the perspective of the senior bureaucrats involved in such decision-making. Using rare in-depth interviews with 30 directors and senior policymakers in 16 of the world’s largest donor countries, we found that the majority of these bureaucrats believed that sudden-onset, national news coverage can increase levels of emergency humanitarian aid allocated to a crisis. They said that this influence operated by triggering other accountability institutions (the public, civil society, elected officials) who put pressure on aid bureaucracies to announce additional funding. However, these practitioners claim that annual humanitarian aid allocations - which are much larger - are unaffected by news pressure. Intriguingly, we also find that many respondents interpret a lack of news coverage as grounds for increasing their annual aid allocations to what they call ‘forgotten crises’. We argue that ‘bureaucratic mediatisation’, rather than the ‘CNN Effect’ or the ‘Cockroach Effect’, provides the most appropriate theoretical perspective to understand these multiple, concurrent and indirect forms of media influence. These findings have important implications for government donors, news organisations and aid agencies, and for our wider understanding of how news coverage may influence foreign policy

Humanitarian Journalism

Humanitarian journalism can be defined, very broadly, as the production of factual accounts about crises and issues that affect human welfare. This can be broken down into two broad approaches: “traditional” reporting about humanitarian crises and issues, and advocacy journalism that aims to improve humanitarian outcomes. In practice, there is overlap between the two approaches. Mainstream journalists have long helped to raise awareness and funds for humanitarian crises, as well as provide early emergency warnings and monitor the treatment of citizens. Meanwhile, aid agencies and humanitarian campaigners frequently subsidize or directly provide journalistic content. There is a large research literature on humanitarian journalism. The most common focus of this research is the content of international reporting about humanitarian crises. These studies show that a small number of “high-profile” crises take up the vast majority of news coverage, leaving others marginalized and hidden. The quantity of coverage is not strongly correlated to the severity of a crisis or the number of people affected but, rather, its geopolitical significance and cultural proximity to the audience. Humanitarian journalism also tends to highlight international rescue efforts, fails to provide context about the causes of a crisis, and operates to erase the agency of local response teams and victims. Communication theorists have argued that this reporting prevents an empathetic and equal encounter between the audience and those affected by distant suffering. However, there are few empirical studies of the mechanisms through which news content influences audiences or policymakers. There are also very few production studies of the news organizations and journalists who produce humanitarian journalism. The research that does exist focuses heavily on news organizations based in the Global North/West