THE CHANNEL
|
ISSUE 1 2015
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27
media that’s produced. That’s our
charitable objective – that everybody
gets paid for their reports.
What news outlets do you go to
with the stories?
There are usually a couple of
people in-house at broadcasters
who see the value of the way that
we report and are willing to do the
extra bit of work that it sometimes
takes to work with a network like
ours.
It’s not always easy to get buy-in.
There’s lots of concern about using
citizen reporting networks, and
quite sensibly. There are some
interesting concerns about
responsibility and ethics. There is a
relationship that needs to develop
between Radar and the media house
that can take a long time before
they realise that we are offering a
kind of stringer network not so
different from the traditional model.
And it helps that a lot of us are
trained journalists and have
worked as freelancers. We have
some lovely relationships with the
New Internationalist
magazine, with
the
Guardian
, the BBC, Channel 4,
Huffington Post, Sky, and a lot of
NGOs as well.
A large number of the journalists
Radar trains are disabled.
About one third of our network has
a physical disability. Not only do we
have a mandate to try and reserve
around a third of the training
spaces for those with disabilities,
but we also have some partnerships
with disability networks.
We’ve never trained a disability
group on their own. We always try
to work with mixed ability groups.
So instead of going and training a
big group of young people with
disabilities, we’ll mainstream them
into the groups with women and
girls, and other target groups, like
slum dwellers. It’s the mixed
training that really provides that
lovely diversity of reporting.
Sometimes it’s the first time that
someone’s learned something
alongside a person with a disability,
or maybe the first time a man has
learned something alongside a
woman, or has shared a room with
someone who is a wheelchair user.
So it does have a nice by-product at
the local level of challenging the
stereotypes there.
Some people might assume that
there are disadvantages to using
reporters with disabilities. But are
there any special advantages or
assets that they bring?
It’s hugely more advantageous than
it is a barrier. Obviously, there are
clear barriers to reporting if you’re
a blind reporter. We have several
visually impaired reporters, and we
have deaf reporters. And we have
reporters, for example in Delhi,
who have severe physical disabilities.
For the training, we go out on
practicals, and trying to get a
rickshaw to pick us up when we’ve
had young people with physical
disabilities was inordinately
difficult. So there are real barriers,
but they’re barriers that they are
absolutely used to overcoming on a
day-to-day basis. Just getting on
transportation is hard, but they
know how to do that.
What we get as an advantage is a
very interesting perspective on civil
issues. There is a sensitivity to
rights that often isn’t present in
other target groups. Young people
with disabilities are very rights-
aware. They’re very used to asking
questions that help to unravel policy.
Also, the most active reporters
we have are those with disabilities.
There is that concept of inclusion
that the project brings them that is
more hard won. And I think the
effort that they put into sourcing
information and the benefit and joy
it gives them to be part of that
mainstream dialogue can’t be
underestimated. In terms of
reporting quality and effort, they
surpass all the other target groups
they work with.
Is citizen journalism beginning to
compete with institutional media?
There is a definite oscillation in
people’s minds between quality
journalism and access journalism -
the idea that you might go to a
source because of their proximity to
the issue, and you go to the high-
end quality production to see what
was handpicked as the most
verified information. Maybe Radar
tries to be those eyes and ears.
As we grow, the issues that
become most important to citizens
will become the issues that we will
cover. I think the exciting thing for
us is we aren’t sure what Radar will
become over the next few years.
You were a judge in last year’s
AIBs
.
What was the experience like?
I think I was invited to the judging
panel because at Radar we work
with such low-res material and we
always try to see the value in that.
It’s very hard to put the varying
types of material all in the same box
but I think it’s a good thing to do,
because it challenges the idea of
what’s quality. We’re just at a cusp,
I think, with media seeing the value
in low-res access material, where
proximity to the issue is the
exciting bit.
I think Syria has changed that a
lot, and the Arab Spring. Up until
now, high production value has
been part of the experience. That’s
what says credibility and is what
gets people excited. The fact that
they’re now on a par of being
judged together is a big step.
I think it will take us a little
while to where the two can
compete, but we’re not far off. With
YouTube and everything in the self-
made video world you’re beginning
to see a shift in what people expect
and what people see as quality.
Libby Powell, thank you.
www.onourradar.org
Radar
journalist Moses
Kortu delivered
some of the first
on-the-scene
reporting of
Sierra Leone’s
Ebola epidemic,
including for
Channel 4 News
in the UK
Some Radar
journalists report
fromareas with
very little
infrastructure
JOURNALISM
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THE CHANNEL
