The Freelancer–NGO Alliance

Abstract

This paper explores the impact that emerging partnerships—particularly between freelancers and nonprofits—are having on the practices of contemporary foreign news reporting. Through an exploration of a widely published project on a health crisis in East Africa—funded by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and reported by the study's author—this study ultimately argues that issues of framing, representation, and ideology are not dominating foreign news production; they are being hotly contested within it. The importance of having a journalist on the ground and the urgency of “liveness”, however, is argued to be losing significance within the current model, which often destines foreign news imagery to be decontextualized for universal appeal.

KEYWORDS:

• crisis reporting
• foreign news
• journalism
• NGO
• representation
• subsidy