Digital Volunteer Networks and Humanitarian Crisis Reporting

Dmitry Chernobrov

doi:10.1080/21670811.2018.1462666

Abstract

Digital technologies and big data are rapidly transforming humanitarian crisis response and changing the traditional roles and powers of its actors. This article looks at a particular aspect of this transformation—the appearance of digital volunteer networks—and explores their potential to act as a new source for media coverage, in addition to their already established role as emergency response supporters. I argue that digital humanitarians can offer a unique combination of speed and safe access, while escaping some of the traditional constraints of the aid-media relationship and exceeding the conventional conceptualizations of citizen journalism. Journalists can find both challenges and opportunities in the environment where multiple crisis actors are assuming some of the media roles. The article draws on interviews with humanitarian organizations, journalists, and digital volunteer networks about their understanding of digital humanitarian communication and its significance for media coverage of crises.

Highlights

There were only two western correspondents in Rwanda in April 1994 (Thompson 2007) when the genocide started
Digital transformations suggest the more direct communication between affected populations, donor audiences and aid agencies. How would this impact the role of the media in this relationship? What would this mean for empowering people themselves, when the major actors in crises have traditionally been states, local structures and international organizations? This article takes up these questions to discuss how the new forms of digital communication between affected populations, volunteers, aid agencies, and media are changing humanitarian crises, their coverage, and the power of the actors involved
The rise of social media and citizen journalism has led many to suggest that traditional, professional journalism was facing a crisis and rivalry from online platforms and user-generated content (Dailey and Starbird 2014)

Summary

Introduction

There were only two western correspondents in Rwanda in April 1994 (Thompson 2007) when the genocide started. Besides “citizen journalists” who could share eyewitness accounts to the unravelling events and whose outputs are widely picked up by media in crisis situations and are well explored in media literature (Aitamurto 2016; Dailey and Starbird 2014; van der Haak, Parks, and Castells 2012), the Haiti earthquake gave birth to “digital humanitarians” or “digital volunteers”—the online community of volunteers across borders and cultures who collaborated to collect, verify, translate, and map information about the crisis across various digital channels from Twitter to SMS to aid the relief efforts (Meier 2015a; Park and Johnston 2017) They offered a new, constantly updated digital source of information about the crisis which could help inform local. How would this impact the role of the media in this relationship? What would this mean for empowering people themselves (both the affected populations and the digital volunteers who span across state borders), when the major actors in crises have traditionally been states, local structures and international organizations? This article takes up these questions to discuss how the new forms of digital communication between affected populations, volunteers, aid agencies, and media are changing humanitarian crises, their coverage, and the power of the actors involved

Method

Findings

A New Role for Journalism?