“How do we encourage and support flows of information?”

Zanna K. McKay
Aug 31, 2018 · 5 min read

Working as a freelance journalist in Southeast Asia for the last four years, several of the stories I pursued allowed me glimpses into cohesive communities of different kinds. Usually what united these different groups was a purpose, goal or challenge(s).

As a green reporter, I had to keep my pitches well-defined and deliver on them. One of the surprising benefits of that was — if I had chosen the right issue to report on — a definitive community often emerged as one source introduced me to another source with the same purpose or challenge, and so on.

Some groups were demographically similar. Garment workers in Cambodia, for example, were almost exclusively young women from rural villages. Others were demographically diverse, united by an elementary school, or a movement to preserve the architecture of their city, with wide variations socioeconomically, in education, or in access to various resources.

Vun Em, a former garment worker and founder of the Messenger Band, which travels to villages throughout Cambodia to educate young women and their families on the realities of life in the garment industry.

I often felt like something of an interloper, though, and not just because I was a foreigner. When the piece I was working on was published, I would send it to my interviewees and feel like there was no practical way to stay engaged with this community I had gotten to know. I could hope that someone might read the piece and feel compelled to learn more about it.

This was due to my own inexperience, but also in part to the nature of freelancing today. I had to move on to another paying job as quickly as possible if I couldn’t immediately find other angles to pitch. (Side note, for those interested: see this interview in the Columbia Jrn Review on why Sulome Anderson quit freelancing overseas).

As someone who traffics in information, what struck me was how often issues of access to information were raised during my reporting. One of my favorite reporting trips and the best example of this was a photo essay I did on how climate change affects people in the Mekong Delta.

Throughout the Delta, which produces a majority of Vietnam’s food, farmers of all kinds were coming up with innovative adaptations to rising sea-levels, drought and increasing salinity of the water. Rice farmers were taking notes from fish farmers and switching to aquaculture; while the WWF was helping shrimp farmers reduce diseases caused by excessive heat by integrating tilapia into the ponds.

Shrimp farmers in the Mekong Delta

What if there had been some kind of central hub where farmers could share information with each other? I wonder if the information might even be useful for other areas of the world facing the same challenges.

At the time I wasn’t aware of International Media Development, which imagines media and communications as dynamic and all-encompassing, i.e. “a two-way conversation”. Jesse Hardman articulates the potential of the relationships between journalists, communities and information really well in “Listening is a Revolutionary Act: Part 1”.

My work as a freelancer felt like a one-way street, where I brought information about a community abroad to a mostly American audience. That’s a crucial part of news coverage; a role for which I have immense respect. No area of the industry has been hit quite as hard by the tumult of the last twenty years as foreign bureaus. Journalism is absolutely not better off because of the decline of foreign correspondents.

But I realized it wasn’t what I was hoping to do as a journalist.

“There are millions of Americans who lack access to basic resources, including information that might improve their situations.” — Jesse Hardman

Information can be scarce not only for people facing wars, natural disasters or extreme poverty. In Southeast Asia, especially Vietnam and Cambodia, censorship and violent government repression are major hinderances to people getting the information they need.

Everyone who uses the internet, and those who package content for the internet, particularly in developed nations, also operate in the “attention economy”. (That link is a digression, I am not endorsing all the ideas there).

…Abundance also creates relative scarcity. This scarcity is analogous to the problem of information overload. For example media (i.e. video, music, literature etc) in a world of abundance would have a scarcity of attention. — Carlos E. Perez

Returning to the States, as a Social J student, I am hoping to understand a wider scope for a journalist’s role in handling information that comes from or pertains to a community. The questions I’ll have in mind:

How do we encourage and support flows of information? How do we add value to them? -Jeff Jarvis, Geeks Bearing Gifts

P.S.

As I wrote above, none of this is to say that foreign correspondents should do their jobs differently or to discourage anyone from pursuing that path. This is my favorite example of why having a foreigner cover a conflict can be immensely valuable:

Rukmini Callimachi was one of the first people on the scene after jihadists invaded Timbuktu. It was a dangerous situation for her — an impossible situation for anyone who appeared to be local. She filed this piece about some of the oldest manuscripts in the world being saved by the guard/librarian of the building where they were kept.

Her reporting provided perspective for how this conflict related to all of us — these manuscripts are a heritage that belongs to humanity. At least five books were written by other journalists about this afterwards and countless other pieces were filed.

Zanna K. McKay

Written by

Social Journalism class of 2019 — Newmark J-School

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