The Advocacy Newsroom
Before I came to Human Rights Watch I reported for public radio and other news organizations for more than a decade, funding some of my international reporting with grants from nonprofit fellowship programs. I was devoted to journalism and didn’t imagine I’d ever defect to an advocacy group–until foreign reporting budgets began to shrink and new jobs like my current one (senior multimedia producer) began to appear at established nonprofits.
I don’t call the work we do at Human Rights Watch journalism, though our workplace can sometimes feel like a newsroom. The focus is much narrower than at a mainstream news organization; it’s exclusively on human rights issues. And while we often pursue the same stories that mainstream journalists are covering (see the recent New York Times147 and Human Rights Watch148 coverage of mass killings in Tikrit, Iraq), our criteria for deploying resources gives added weight to working where we can bring about the most change. That leads to a different emphasis–our reports stress the abuses, abusers, and international standards more than most journalists would in their stories.
But if you see a Human Rights Watch researcher doing interviews in the field, it won’t look much different from a foreign correspondent on the job–assuming that correspondent is reporting on human rights issues and has the time and inclination to speak with scores of witnesses and survivors. Researchers check these accounts against other sources–activists, local journalists, country experts, and government officials. Human Rights Watch increasingly seeks comment from those accused of abuses, just as journalists do.
When our research is complete, our report is written and our lawyers vet it for consistency with international law, as well as libel and fairness concerns; our work does not end with publication. We always issue a clear call for change, usually in the form of detailed recommendations to governments and international institutions. The Human Rights Watch website describes the goal like this: “We work to increase the price of human rights abuse. The more tyrants we bring to justice, the more potential abusers will reconsider committing human rights violations.”
With emergency situations happening in places now covered by few foreign correspondents, we and other advocacy groups often serve as a kind of niche wire service for breaking news. As fighting erupted in the Central African Republic in 2013, for example, Human Rights Watch’s Peter Bouckaert149 and Bleasdale, the photographer, were among the few foreigners reporting on a sustained basis from the ground. Their work for Human Rights Watch ran on CNN and ABC, and on the Foreign Policy and National Geographic websites. Similarly, the breaking news blog at the New York Times website used tweets from Amnesty International’s Joanne Mariner, including a photo of a Muslim boy in the Central African Republic who had suffered a machete attack at the hands of the Christian militia.150
“Five years ago NGOs were just starting to experiment with the idea that they were media providers,” said Ethan Zuckerman, director of the Center for Civic Media at the news and information, said Zuckerman, “they understand they have to be.”
Amnesty International, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and the International Rescue Committee have created portals that make their content available for journalists to download upon registering with the site. Human Rights Watch has a similar system that’s led to increased pickup from mainstream broadcasters–even by major outlets that first balked at the idea of using an advocacy group’s raw footage and produced pieces. Among those who now run Human Rights Watch video on air and online are CNN,151 the BBC,152 and Al Jazeera America. 157 Human Rights Watch has partnerships with BuzzFeed and the European Broadcasting Union, which often distributes the group’s raw footage to news outlets worldwide. Our videos are not advertisements for the organization; they include documentary evidence, such as interviews that Human Rights Watch researchers have done with survivors of human rights abuses, satellite images, maps, and primary documents. Some media organizations, on principle, decline video or other material produced by advocacy groups. Even so, within mainstream newsrooms newer departments–like blogs that curate and aggregate from many sources–may have greater leeway in using material like ours.
Robert Mackey, a digital columnist for the New York Times Foreign desk,153 said he usually deletes email news releases from advocacy groups. But when a story is breaking far away, he often posts video or tweets from people working on the ground for Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Doctors Without Borders, or local groups like the activist Egyptian filmmakers at Mosireen.154 “It does seem clear that you guys are doing the work of journalists in a lot of cases,” Mackey told me. “It doesn’t matter whether the person doing the work has a point of view, but whether the work is rigorous and factual.”