World Report 2011 - Human Rights Watch

WORLD REPORT 2011Picking Up the Slack?For NGOs with large field presences–and even for those with only an occasionalinvestigator or representative overseas–the ability to generate and distributecontent is potentially revolutionary. But it requires more than taking a cellphonephotograph of a news event and posting it to Facebook. The question iswhether NGOs will operate systematically in the vacuum left by the commercialmedia. To do so will require re-purposing the information they are alreadygathering, and acquiring the skills to reach the public directly with featurescapable of attracting public attention. At present not many NGOs have theresources to reconfigure their research and information into user-friendly content.Most of them operate on the written word. Often they are addressingother experts rather than the public at large. Importantly, they generally haveprecious little visual information to illustrate their findings.That is beginning to change. Human Rights Watch assigns professional photographers,videographers, and radio producers to work in the field alongsideits researchers, documenting in multimedia features what the researchers aredocumenting in words. 13Amnesty International is creating an autonomous “news unit,” staffed withfive professional journalists, to generate human rights news. Medecins SansFrontieres also uses photography and video extensively, while the NaturalResources Defense Council is assigning journalists to write about environmentalissues.Even if NGOs are able to produce user-friendly content, the question remainsof how to distribute it. An NGO can post content on its website, and reach afew thousand people, perhaps tens of thousands. Distributing via Facebook,Twitter, YouTube, and other social media might garner a few thousand more.Content that “goes viral” and reaches millions of people remains the rareexception. Sooner or later the question of distribution returns to the main-30