"This article highlights how one online news organisation in the global south, with no more than three staff and no foreign correspondents, strategically used multiple wire service feeds to successfully cover a significant story more comprehensively than its better-endowed co-owner. It compares the
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timeliness and comprehensiveness of coverage of this century's first genocide in Darfur, Sudan, by the United Kingdom's Guardian (UKG) and its co-owned South African Mail & Guardian Online (MGO). Despite the 3 000 miles distance between Darfur and Johannesburg, its lack of foreign reporters and few staff, the MGO covered the Darfur crisis earlier, with better attention to detail and specifics. The MGO staff expressed surprise at their more comprehensive coverage, and credited the clarity that came from their primary gatekeeping focus on Africa as the reason." (Abstract)
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"This article investigates what the news says about inequity-driven civil wars and economic underdevelopment. Dewey argued that the lack of causal knowledge that distinguishes between symptoms and root causes would limit potential effective and transformative public action. Political scientists have
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demonstrated that increases in just the number of news stories about a foreign country in both US print and TV news in one year produced a clearly significant relationship to increases in commitments of US foreign aid the following year. This study of reporting on a 2003-2005 African crisis by ten news organizations over 26 months found few articles predominantly focused on causes against conditions on the ground or remedies. It raises questions about the conditions under which news organizations might be expected to provide causal knowledge and when such information can lead to more enlightened long term aid for national transformation." (Abstract)
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"Audience segmentation is generally associated with strategic communication (such as advertising and public relations), where content is manipulated to suit reader preferences. News has generally been considered truth-telling unvarnished by such concerns. This article compares how news of the same h
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umanitarian crisis [in Darfur, Sudan] was designed by 10 news organizations in seven countries for different market segments. Comparisons showed statistically significant differences in representation, influenced in part by what the audience-market was. Like advertising, news seemed to share an attribute with the strategic design of advertising and public relations. Increasingly carried online, news will be vulnerable to click-based customization of content like advertising is, taking us beyond currently observed geopolitical influences on segmentation to advertiser and market-based differences." (Abstract)
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"To reshape the field of development communication, Redeveloping Communication for Social Change proposes situating theory and practice within contexts of power, recognizing both the ability of dominant groups to control and the potential for marginal communities to resist. Contributors from communi
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cation and anthropology explore the global and institutional structures within which agencies construct social problems and interventions, the discourse guiding the normative climate for conceiving and implementing projects, and the practice of strategic interventions for social change. Examining early and emerging models of development, power dynamics, ethnographic approaches, gender issues, and information technologies, they speculate how a framework accounting for power might contribute toward new directions and applications in the field. Instead of mourning the demise of development communication, this volume should provoke critical debate that will help us change our approaches to meet new challenges." (Publisher description)
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"This book focuses on designing audience-responsive messages for use in developing countries. Author Bella Mody explains an audience research-based methodology to bridge the cultural and informati
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onal distance between senders and receivers. The introductory background against which the author reviews the research on media effects is a historical discussion of the origins and nature of media use in national development. Mody then presents audience research as a systematic device for the involvement of message receivers in decisions concerning message design. In short, the audience contributes to and tests what the message needs to say and how it is delivered. This volume, focused on instruction for development and communication planners, as well as media workers, proposes first listening to the audience so as to determine which information the audience needs and in what form they can process it most effectively and, then, pretesting messages before they are produced in their final form." (Website Communication Initiative, 11/2007)
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