Ngos As Newsmakers

As traditional news outlets’ international coverage has waned, several prominent nongovernmental organizations have taken on a growing number of seemingly journalistic functions. Groups such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Médecins Sans Frontières send reporters to gather information and provide analysis and assign photographers and videographers to boost the visibility of their work. Digital technologies and social media have increased the potential for NGOs to communicate directly with the public, bypassing traditional gatekeepers. But have these efforts changed and expanded traditional news practices and coverage—and are there consequences to blurring the lines between reporting and advocacy? In NGOs as Newsmakers, Matthew Powers analyzes the growing role NGOs play in shaping—and sometimes directly producing—international news. Drawing on interviews, observations, and content analysis, he charts the dramatic growth in NGO news-making efforts, examines whether these efforts increase the organizations' chances of garnering news coverage, and analyzes the effects of digital technologies on publicity strategies. Although the contemporary media environment offers NGOs greater opportunities to shape the news, Powers finds, it also subjects them to news-media norms. While advocacy groups can and do provide coverage of otherwise ignored places and topics, they are still dependent on traditional media and political elites and influenced by the expectations of donors, officials, journalists, and NGOs themselves. Through an unprecedented glimpse into NGOs’ newsmaking efforts, Powers portrays the possibilities and limits of NGOs as newsmakers amid the transformations of international news, with important implications for the intersections of journalism and advocacy.

This book examines the central role media and communication play in the activities of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) around the globe, how NGOs communicate with key publics, engage stakeholders, target political actors, enable input from civil society, and create participatory opportunities. An international line-up of authors first discuss communication practices, strategies, and media uses by NGOs, providing insights into the specifics of NGO programs for social change goals and reveal particular sets of tactics NGOs commonly employ. The book then presents a set of case studies of NGO organizing from all over the world—ranging from Sudan via Brazil to China – to illustrate the particular contexts that make NGO advocacy necessary, while also highlighting successful initiatives to illuminate the important spaces NGOs occupy in civil society. This comprehensive and wide-ranging exploration of global NGO communication will be of great interest to scholars across communication studies, media studies, public relations, organizational studies, political science, and development studies, while offering accessible pieces for practitioners and organizers.

As video becomes an important tool to expose injustice, an examination of how human rights organizations are seeking to professionalize video activism. Visual imagery is at the heart of humanitarian and human rights activism, and video has become a key tool in these efforts. The Saffron Revolution in Myanmar, the Green Movement in Iran, and Black Lives Matter in the United States have all used video to expose injustice. In Seeing Human Rights, Sandra Ristovska examines how human rights organizations are seeking to professionalize video activism through video production, verification standards, and training. The result, she argues, is a proxy profession that uses human rights videos to tap into journalism, the law, and political advocacy. Ristovska explains that this proxy profession retains some tactical flexibility in its use of video while giving up on the more radical potential and imaginative scope of video activism as a cultural practice. Drawing on detailed analysis of legal cases and videos as well as extensive interviews with staff members of such organizations as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, WITNESS, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), and the International Criminal Court (ICC), Ristovska considers the unique affordances of video and examines the unfolding relationships among journalists, human rights organizations, activists, and citizens in global crisis reporting. She offers a case study of the visual turn in the law; describes advocacy and marketing strategies; and argues that the transformation of video activism into a proxy profession privileges institutional and legal spaces over broader constituencies for public good.

This handbook brings together multidisciplinary and internationally diverse contributors to provide an overview of theory, research, and practice in the nonprofit and nongovernmental organization (NGO) communication field. It is structured in four main parts: the first introduces metatheoretical and multidisciplinary approaches to the nonprofit sector; the second offers distinctive structural approaches to communication and their models of reputation, marketing, and communication management; the third focuses on nonprofit organizations’ strategic communications, strategies, and discourses; and the fourth assembles campaigns and case studies of different areas of practice, causes, and geographies. The handbook is essential reading for scholars, educators, and advanced students in nonprofit and NGO communication within public relations and strategic communication, organizational communication, sociology, management, economics, marketing, and political science, as well as a useful reference for leaders and communication professionals in the nonprofit sector.

The Research Handbook on Visual Politics focuses on key theories and methodologies for better understanding visual political communication. It also concentrates on the depictions of power within politics, taking a historical and longitudinal approach to the topic of placing visuals within a wider framework of political understanding.

This book examines how journalism functions among “synergistic effects” of climate change, such as compounded impact of severe weather, social and political responses to changing global warming, and the often-unfortunate results and impacts on our environments. The volume emerges as global communities attempt to address climate events already challenging for journalists to cover and the social and cultural outcomes associated with them. Chapters in this book bring together global scholars and media practitioners who highlight digital challenges in covering the complexities of environmental change, from climate deniers and facts to longstanding and new approaches to covering heat, disaster, safety, mis- and dis-information, and data. These chapters provide conceptual and practical solutions to issues journalists (and scholars) face amidst global contestation and global warming to better communicate in an increasingly digital age. Journalism and Reporting Synergistic Effects of Climate Change will be an invaluable resource for scholars, researchers and practitioners in journalism, mass communication, media studies, environmental communication, communication studies, and sociology. It was originally published as a special issue of Journalism Practice.

Exploring the deep transformation that journalism has undergone in the last decade, this book provides students, professors and working journalists with the background on the demise of traditional media in the U.S. and the changes happening in the digital newsrooms. Houston discusses today’s changes in journalism in the U.S., comparing and contrasting them with those around the world. Topics discussed include the decimation of the traditional newsrooms, contemporary corporate ownership and investors, the rise of bloggers and digital journalism, finding new audiences, the surge in nonprofit newsrooms and collaborations, investigative centers in the U.S. and globally, new model start-ups, and changing streams of revenue with the expansion of new technologies. The text also looks at the new relationship between journalism professionals and the academy, including the rise in content and stories supplied by university-based newsrooms. Houston, who has been on the frontline of these changes, also discusses the culture clashes and ethical dilemmas in cyber environments accompanied by new challenges to maintaining credibility and creating trust. To fully explore the rapid-fire changes in news media and online journalism in recent years, this book will be of interest to students of journalism and communications, working journalists, and professors helping prepare budding journalists for their future careers in journalism.

The Routledge Handbook of Humanitarian Communication is an authoritative and comprehensive guide to research in the academic sub-field of humanitarian communication. It is broadly focused on communication that presents human vulnerability as a cause for public concern and encompasses communication with respect to humanitarian aid and development as well as human rights and "humanitarian" wars. Recent years have seen the expansion of critical scholarship on humanitarian communication across a range of academic fields, sharing recognition of the centrality of media and communications to our understanding of humanitarianism as an agent of transnational power, global governance and cosmopolitan solidarity. The Handbook brings into dialogue these diverse fields, their theoretical frameworks and methodological approaches as well as the public debates that lie at the heart of the contemporary politics of humanitarianism. It consolidates existing knowledge and maps out this emerging field as an important site of interdisciplinary knowledge production on media, communication and humanitarianism. As such, the Handbook is not simply a collection of texts sharing a similar theme. It is a coherent intellectual contribution which systematizes current critical scholarship in terms of Domains, Methods and Issues and sets an agenda of emerging and evolving research priorities in the field. Consisting of 26 chapters written by international scholars, who have contributed to laying the foundation of the field, this volume provides an essential guide to the key ideas, issues, concepts and debates of humanitarian communication.