Niall Martin is Editor of Morning Ireland. He sent us this email to contribute to the debate on coverage of development issues. He gave us permission to put it up on the site – to contribute to the debate “ so long as it is focussed on providing solutions and not railing against the way it is”
I agree with everything Niall says about the good story, but I don’t agree that this is where it “starts and ends.” (Monks walking up and down streets of Rangoon - so what? Point is the nature of the regime in Burma and the role of the monks) He knows that Burma will be a story for a while, so he sees the need to cover the issue of human rights abuses in Burma – the challenge is how.
The trick is to move from the issue to finding a compelling way to make it comprehensible. Another famine in a place most people can’t find on a map won’t of itself grab audience attention, but there are two threads involved: the immediate one of how the population is affected and the other one is the issues about the causes of the famine: maybe war, maybe drought caused by climate change, maybe the failure of agriculture because the productive age groups are dead or dying of AIDs.
Those issues have to be covered, as well as the short term consequences, because if you don’t cover them you are short-changing your audience. The next famine will roll along and no one will understand why.
The stories need to be properly told and that is a challenge to the creativity of the people who want them told. Everything Niall says is valuable: even for a programme like Morning Ireland It has a huge audience, but competes, inevitably, in many instances with the lost school bag or the mislaid car keys.
The point about speaking to the converted is an important one. There does seem to be an approach that if you do not have a lot of interest in world affairs or current affairs generally that you have no ethical base, which clearly isn’t the case. It is also probably true, even if we are slow to admit it, that most people don’t have the time to read the full page or the half page feature: they may mean to read it, they may want to read it – but it is green bin day again and out it goes. A couple of good pictures or paragraphs in the Star have a lot of impact.
Everything else is the kind of stuff that any press officer worth her salt should know, but it is a bit concerning that someone like Niall still thinks it needs to be said. As for conferences: I agree totally. Conferences are very important for the practitioner and an essential way of moving discussions along. But the fact that a conference is being held…………….!!