Why Freelancers Matter

John McCarthy

We live in a time when advances in technology mean we can see live coverage of events more or less anywhere on the planet. Yet despite this ability to observe other people and places we remain ignorant of so much that is happening in the world around us.

Photo: Anne McCarthey

Understandably we tend to get wrapped up in events close to home, issues that directly affect our lives. Stories from other places, other cultures, often only come to our attention when they reach catastrophic levels, when drought and poor harvests provoke famine, when persecution and war lead to mass migration or genocide.

These disasters will generate headlines for a while and then sink back into relative obscurity. The big news organisations, newspapers and broadcasters, watching their sales, viewing figures - and each other - will look for something new to cover.

Very often those stories have initially come to the attention of news editors because of the work of freelancers. Working with limited budgets, often in remote and dangerous places, freelancers break stories that otherwise go unnoticed.

And when the media’s attention has moved on, it is freelancers who will continue covering those stories, struggling to remind the world that while, for example, famine conditions may have eased in Ethiopia and people may have left the refugee camps and returned to their villages, the problem has not disappeared. The people still struggle desperately to survive, hoping for a better crop but subsisting on boiled weeds. Because of their long-term commitment to such stories, often lifelong in the case of local journalists, freelancers understand the cultures and the traditions of the people they are reporting on.

A common tendency to laziness and complacency mean that a couple of reports from somewhere encourage people to assume that they understand the issues and problems of that place clearly and so know what needs to be done. Largely ignorant of the detailed background and the traditions of other peoples, governments assume a moral right to impose their values and political systems on those people. To see beyond the politicians’ spin we need to realise the true complexities of such situations.

Freelancers, taking the initiative and physical risk, often using their own money, go out to explore those complexities. They alert us to developing situations, they remind us of situations that we have ignored or forgotten and they give us the chance to review our own attitudes and actions and to take an informed responsibility for the world around us.

John McCarthy is a freelance journalist

The Rory Peck Awards Brochure 2004

• Programme
• Why Freelancers Matter
• A Year of Growth...
• ...and Freelance Achievement
• From Sony
• The Overseas Project
• Reporting Iraq
• The Freelance World
  An Iraqi in Iraq
  An American in Iraq
  In Pakistan
  In Haiti
  In Zimbabwe
• Report on Safety Training Course
• Trauma can get stuck in the system
• For Roddy - and Helping Others

The Rory Peck Awards

• Winners
• Finalists

  
  

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