Building a better journalism in the global south ‘takes time, takes money, and we need partners in that journey’
After a conference discussion on “Journalism, the Pandemic and the Global South,” panelist Heba Aly shares her insights as director of The New Humanitarian on the challenges faced by journalism during COVID-19, as well as the conditions needed to make that vital work sustainable.
COVID-19 has changed so much of daily life, and journalism is not immune. But how has the pandemic changed the way journalists do work in the global south?
Five speakers participating in a panel titled “Journalism, the Pandemic, and the Global South” — a discussion held Thursday during Carleton University’s Journalism in the Time of Crisis conference — sought answers to that question.
Moderated by Heather Gilberds, associate director and editor at the Centre for International Media Assistance, the panel featured Laxmi Parthasarathy of the Global Press Institute; Sulemana Braimah of the Media Foundation for West Africa; Ayman Mhanna of the Samir Kassir Foundation; and Heba Aly of The New Humanitarian.
Parthasarathy explained how her team was fortunate to be prepared for the crisis, citing their protocols to prioritize the well-being of their foreign correspondents in all aspects of the work they do. She lauded their system of relying on reporters to sketch a picture of their local context as key to their continued success while operating during the pandemic.
Braimah said COVID-19’s impact on the media in Africa has not been different than what has been experienced around the world, where newsrooms have shrunk due to mass layoffs and financial challenges severely constraining reporting resources.
But he said Ghana is set apart by the severity of the blow. One of the factors he identified as contributing to the financial losses for media companies in the region is “digitization without monetization,” where old revenue models are not replaced with new ones that can sustain the outlets.
Mhanna shared his organization’s experiences grappling with difficult new realities on the ground in Lebanon. In a precarious state before the pandemic, the country has plunged towards economic collapse — especially after this year’s tragic explosion in the port of Beirut. These factors, he explained, have added pressure on his news operation, making staff retention especially challenging and the need for sustaining grants more vital.
Aly explained that because The New Humanitarian — a UN-founded, nonprofit news organization that now operates independently — is devoted to reporting on crises across the global south, a major challenge currently confronting the organization is the way that COVID-19 has eclipsed attention towards other crises occurring at the same time.
In many places where their organization had journalists on the ground, Aly said, the pandemic was not the worst thing they were facing. This dynamic obscured these other unfolding crises, making it almost impossible to give them proper attention and coverage, she said.
After the panel discussion, the Carleton conference news team engaged in a deeper conversation with Aly, a graduate of Carleton’s School of Journalism and Communication (BJ ’06) and a former CBC journalist.
A multimedia journalist by training, Heba spent a decade reporting from conflict zones in the Middle East, Africa and Central Asia before moving into management with The New Humanitarian.
Her work for The New Humanitarian, as well as CBC, the Christian Science Monitor, Bloomberg News and other media outlets, have taken her to places such as Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Chad and Libya. She is a regular commentator on humanitarian policy in her published work, in governmental briefings and at conferences around the world. She is a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on the Humanitarian System.
Aly discussed her organization’s work and the challenges The New Humanitarian faces in producing quality journalism during the pandemic. She also shared her thoughts on what needs to happen to make work done in organizations like hers more sustainable in the long-term.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: What work does The New Humanitarian do, and what’s your role in making it happen?
A: The New Humanitarian is a nonprofit independent newsroom that reports about humanitarian crises — everything from conflicts to natural hazards, refugee flows to epidemics — and the way the world responds to those questions. So we look at the aid industry and try to hold it accountable and be a platform for discussion about the best way to respond to crises. As the director, I run it.
Q: During your panel, you mentioned your organization’s readership tripled over the pandemic. You also said you hope it has opened a window of opportunity to reach people in a way that you couldn’t before. How do you think you can take advantage of that window?
Part of it is finding ways when people come to our site for news on COVID-19. How do we then hang on to them? How do we interest them in the wider issues? How do we hook them into what we do?
It’s also about crafting a narrative about what COVID-19 represents, and helping people understand that COVID-19 is not an isolated event. COVID-19 is the future: We’re going to see more of these global kinds of transformative events. And the biggest, most obvious one is climate change. If people are taken aback at how COVID-19 has shaken the world, climate change is going to be so much more powerful and threatening . . .
There’s a whole generation now of people who want to make the world a better place, but you can’t do that until you understand what the problem is, and what the solution is. The first step is informing yourself about these major challenges facing the world, and we see ourselves as providing part of that picture. So it’s helping people connect the dots between what they’ve just experienced and that bigger picture — and hopefully that sparks a connection that might not have existed before the pandemic.
Q: The theme of the conference is journalism in crisis. In your panel, you mentioned many issues that your organization is facing during this time. Which do you feel is most pressing to address at this time?
I think we’re hopefully on the brink of a different kind of model for journalism moving forward, one in which journalism plays a more public service function, where readers see value in it and are willing to fund it and in which donors (who can be individual readers, philanthropists, etc.) understand its role in society and are willing to put money behind it . . .
But also how you get people engaged in these issues and how you help people see that crises that may not immediately appear to be relevant to their lives actually do have an impact on them. How do you help them feel some kind of connection to these wider issues? So for us, COVID-19 can be an opportunity on both of those fronts. It will be interesting to see how the world plays itself out.
Q: Those looming issues seem like heavy burdens to carry, and challenges that are not easy to overcome. How are you doing?
I’m tired. Making a nonprofit media organization survive in 2020 is hard work. And we’ve been going at a pace that probably is unsustainable in the long term. We all made the case during the panel that, yes, we can take these tiny pockets of funding and do something with it now. But in the long term, eventually, we’re going to crash — because we’re all trying to do too much with too little. COVID-19 has made that worse in the sense that now we have even more to cover. And everyone’s dealing with their own personal trauma or anxiety. It’s just a lot. Our beat is so big and relevant. And it’s unfair, frankly, to depend on this kind of news without being willing to help the people trying to produce it, because we just keep going and at some point, we’re not going to go anymore . . .
We need that consciousness among those who do care about thriving media that transformations and building new business models takes time, takes money, and we need partners in that journey.
Check out the whole panel discussion here.
