Glenda Cooper

UGC Creators and Use of Their Content by Mainstream Media

Images and words describing crisis events are now often created not by journalists but ordinary citizens—so-called “accidental journalists” (Allan in Citizen witnessing: Revisioning journalism in times of crisis. Polity‚ Cambridge‚ pp. 1–26‚ 2013). Many researchers have seen this as a democratisation of communication and shift in the journalistic field (Bourdieu in On television and journalism. Pluto‚ London‚ 1998; Benson and Neveu in Bourdieu and the journalistic field. Polity‚ Cambridge, 2005; Russell in Critical Studies in Media Communication 24:285–302‚ 2007). Much research has (rightly) centred on how the use of this material affects journalists (Bruns in The active audience: Transforming journalism from gatekeeping to gatewatching, 2008; Wardle and Williams in Understanding its impact on contributors, non-contributors and BBC news‚ 2008; Cooper in Anyone here survived a wave, speak English and got a mobile? Aid agencies, the media and reporting disasters since the tsunami, Nuffield College‚ Oxford, 2007; From their own correspondent? New media and the changes in disaster coverage: Lessons to be learned, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism‚ Oxford‚ 2011) or the reactions of the audience (Wahl-Jorgensen et al. in Northern Lights: Film & Media Studies Yearbook 8:177–194‚ 2010). In contrast, this chapter draws on 24 semistructured qualitative interviews with those caught up in the Great East Japan earthquake (March 2011) or the Moore tornado in Oklahoma (May 2013) and whose images/words were used by two major UK media players, the BBC and The Guardian in their liveblogs, often without the knowledge of the content’s creators. These users were questioned about the consequences of their material being used with the aim of answering the following questions: How are voices of citizens in crises being mediated and mediatised? How did such citizens alter their content if they were aware of mainstream media’s interest? How do the views of these citizens inform our understanding of acts of journalism by nonjournalists and the ethical approaches journalists should take when using such content

Unlocking the Gate? How NGOs Mediate the Voices of the Marginalised in a Social Media Context

At the Live 8 concert in 2005, pop star Madonna provided one of the seminal images of the day: dressed all in white, she held hands with a young Ethiopian woman called Birhan Woldu (Carr-Brown et al., 2005). As a young child, Woldu had been the icon of the 1984–85 famine, with her emaciated form appeared in the BBC’s news coverage of Ethiopia — and most famously at Live Aid 1985 to the soundtrack of The Cars’ ‘Drive’.

Chapter Five: ‘Give us your ****ing money’: A Critical Appraisal of TV and the Cash Nexus

At 3 pm on 13 July 1985, Bob Geldof, the organiser of Live Aid, burst out on live television: “People are dying NOW. Give us the money NOW.... F*** the address, give us the phone, here’s the number.” It was, in fact, the first time such an expletive had been used on such a ‘family friendly’ occasion (Franks, 2013) Geldof ’s swearing may have broken boundaries in taste terms—yet after this outburst, giving increased to £300 per second (Geldof, 2014). And Live Aid would, more important, come to symbolise the increasing importance of the cash nexus to the aid industry. Thirty years on, the relationship between rock-’n’-roll, charity, and money claimed the headlines in a very different way, when at the end of 2013 it emerged that the international NGO World Vision UK had paid Elizabeth McGovern (better known as the Countess of Grantham in TV series Downton Abbey) £28,000 to subsidise her band Sadie and the Hotheads, as part of a deal in which she would become an ambassador for the charity. In three decades we have moved from rock stars raising money for aid agencies to aid agencies paying money to rock stars to raise their profile. This chapter will deal with the increasing importance of the cash nexus in the modern humanitarian agency and how consumerism has become embedded in aid. In this, I use Carlyle’s view of the cash nexus of social relationships being reduced to economic gain, then taken on by Marx and Engels, but also the idea as expressed by Dant (2000) of the idea of the cash nexus in the area of personal choice—defining oneself by the NGO you choose to donate to or the NGO product you consume.