Paying the Bills
In recent years, Human Rights Watch has started to make raw footage and produced pieces available with many of our reports. We train researchers to gather multimedia in the field and pair them with photojournalists who can help them find visual evidence and tell visual stories.
Journalists, particularly freelance photographers, who want to report on under-covered international stories say that because of budget cuts at traditional media outlets they are now often able to travel only thanks to paid assignments from advocacy or aid groups, or from grant-giving organizations like the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. In 2010, for example, the Pulitzer Center and Human Rights Watch teamed up to send Bleasdale to follow the trail of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in Congo, the Central African Republic, Sudan, and Uganda.155 The videos they produced had a strong advocacy slant.
In one, victims of the LRA appealed to President Obama to act on commitments to help neutralize the rebel group.156 The video won two Webby Awards, an excerpt was broadcast on the PBS Newshour, and Bleasdale’s still photos from the same assignment were published in The Telegraph,157 Le Monde, Newsweek, and Stern. The Pulitzer Center and Human Rights Watch also hosted an event with Bleasdale to help draw attention to the story. Jon Sawyer, the Pulitzer Center’s director and a former foreign correspondent, said he is comfortable with such collaborations. “I think that every journalism project worth its salt is advocating something, is trying to persuade you of something,” Sawyer said. “Otherwise, why go out and spend the time and the effort to master a subject and go out and interview people?”
These partnerships have become economically vital for photographers from agencies like VII and Magnum, many of whom have been taking assignments from aid and advocacy groups for more than a decade. Last November, for example, the photojournalist Ed Kashi produced a video about Syrian refugee youth that was published on Time’s website.158 The magazine’s fee was tiny, though, Kashi said. His travel expenses to the Syrian refugee camps were paid by the International Medical Corps, which was working in the camps.159 “There’s less commissioning, not just less money but also less desire on the part of magazines for this sort of in-depth, visual storytelling,” said Kashi, who has done similar reporting stints with funding from Open Society Foundations and Oxfam. He is currently working on a project with Human Rights Watch.160 “The NGOs and foundations and nonprofits of the world are really stepping up to pay for, as well as facilitate, the fieldwork.”
The relationship is symbiotic. Advocacy groups need photos and videos to help them tell their stories. Journalists want to tell important stories about global issues. The photographers and videographers who enter into such deals say they usually can strike an agreement that allows them to retain copyrights for their work. So the group funds the trip and gets the material it needs, and the journalist is then free to sell his or her material to news outlets.
Kashi, who came of age when magazines had ample money to commission regular foreign reporting, said he never imagined he’d be using advocacy and aid groups as a primary source of funding. He’s still nostalgic for the days when magazines had money to send him off to cover the world, with few limitations.
But he also said he is comfortable taking assignments from groups like La Isla Foundation, an organization whose sole focus is on ending an epidemic of a rare kidney disease among sugar cane workers in Latin America.161 He’s especially proud of a series he did on the lingering effects of Agent Orange in Vietnam. That project, funded by the Ford Foundation, won photo prizes, but more important to Kashi was this result: The U.S. Congress committed four million dollars to help clean up Agent Orange in Vietnam. “To me that is so much more interesting and powerful than, ‘Hey, look, I got the cover of National Geographic with this picture, but nothing happened,’ ” Kashi said.