Assessing How Media Spurs Engagement: Responses to the Haiti Crisis

How can media best be used in response to a sudden and devastating crisis? The outpouring of coverage, aid and volunteer labor that followed the catastrophic January 12 earthquake in Haiti reveals the myriad of strategies that producers of both old and new media are using to inform and mobilize publics around this disaster.

Celebrities appeal for dollars-and users jam circuits in rush to respond

TV hosts, entertainment and political celebrities, and high profile journalists have all been offering up air and face time to convince viewers to contribute aid. This is traditional fundraising in a broadcast mode-capitalizing on mass appeal to capture as many eyeballs and dollars as possible. There's no doubt that this works-Larry King's January 18 Haiti telethon raised nearly five million dollars for Unicef and the Red Cross, and the surge of donations are still being tallied for yesterday's toned-down Hope for Haiti Now telethon, orchestrated by George Clooney and airing across multiple global networks. For this event, the focus was on motivating viewers via the stories of sufferers and survivors, rather than playing up the cluster of famous faces. If audience members encountered a busy signal-and many did-donors could also contribute funds via texting and online. However, critics noted that the Hope for Haiti Now site crashed under the load of visitors, possibly reducing total donations.

"For some of us, tonight's beautiful program became a stark reminder of how much work we have to do to transform the culture inside our organizations and to make those with the power understand that a proper, functional website is a core business need," writes online strategist Tracy Russo on her personal blog.

Telling the stories of the suffering-or helping them tell their own

Despite jammed airports, downed power lines, and food shortages, both traditional and citizen reporters streamed into Port-au-Prince to document the earthquake's aftermath and the dramatic rescue attempts. Faced with the situation's urgency, some reporters abandoned their traditional objective stance and pitched in-like CNN's Sanjay Gupta, who has been alternately reporting on ground conditions using a variety of old and new media platforms, and lending his own medical skills to help save those pulled from the rubble. The result is a sometimes queasy mix of on-the-spot humanitarian aid and disaster-as-ratings-boosting-spectacle, as revealed by a story in the National Post:

Dr. Gupta appears to have embraced this sense of duty, among chaos, looting and gunfire. "Pulling all nighter at haiti field hosp. lots of work, but all patients stable," he Twittered at 3:45 a.m. on Jan. 16, referring to the field hospital that was left unstaffed after a Belgian medical team fled over fears of looters and riots. "Turned my crew into a crack med team tonight."

But Gupta's decision to swap the microphone for a scalpel is much preferable to a more pernicious breed of coverage, which frames those trapped by crisis as helpless, uncivilized, or worse yet, criminal. As Rebecca Solnit, the author of A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster writes in a piece on TomDispatch, "The belief that people in disaster (particularly poor and nonwhite people) are cattle or animals or just crazy and untrustworthy regularly justifies spending far too much energy and far too many resources on control -- the American military calls it "security" -- rather than relief. A British-accented voiceover on CNN calls people sprinting to where supplies are being dumped from a helicopter a "stampede" and adds that this delivery "risks sparking chaos." The chaos already exists, and you can't blame it on these people desperate for food and water. Or you can, and in doing so help convince your audience that they're unworthy and untrustworthy."

Such sensationalized reporting is a negative form of audience engagement-calling upon viewers' fear, paranoia and embedded social frames rather than their impulses to learn more and help out. Online and mobile platforms are allowing for much more authentic and nuanced forms of reporting. Here, Global Voices provides a roundup of user-generated coverage via Twitter, blogs, Wikipedia, interactive maps, and local outlets.

As has become increasingly common in breaking crises, social media tools have also been used for much more than citizen journalism. MediaShift reports on how users of Twitter rapidly amplifed the call for donations via text, such as the $10 donation to the Red Cross triggered by users sending the word "Haiti" to the number 90999. (See the Project for Exellence in Journalism's New Media Index for a more detailed breakdown of numbers from the first week of response.) Google not only placed a persistent link to resources and aid relief efforts on its famously spartan search page, but commissioned new satellite photos to reveal the earthquake damage on Google Earth and Google Maps. And over the past few weeks, volunteers have convened Crisis Camps in multiple cities to help develop people-finder tools that assist earthquake victims in locating their families, open-source mapping tools to better track the damage in real time, and coordination tools for relief workers. One much-needed collaborative effort, The Disaster Accountability Project, provides a platform for those on the ground to report on gaps in disaster relief and response services.

New capacities demand new metrics

Such projects broadly extend the possibilities of engagement via media platforms. As Lucy Bernholz writes on Philanthropy 2173: a blog dedicated to examining strategies for charitable giving:

In all the reports about the outpouring of cash to aid Haiti, we've lost sight of the outpouring of crowds. We don't have an easy dollar value to hang on the tools that are being built or the monitoring that will come. But that shouldn't stop us from taking account of these efforts. Unlike the typical donation of goods or time in a disaster--which can themselves be, well, disasterous--this kind of help is valuable."

The scope of media responses to Haiti's earthquake suggest a corresponding slate of new approaches for assessing crisis coverage: not just evaluating whether dollars or "awareness" have been raised, but whether people have been moved to contribute content, skills, or attention that lasts beyond the sensationalized moment. The situation also raises pressing ethical questions for reporters about how to balance crisis coverage with their own involvement. We'll be tackling both of these topics at our upcoming Making Your Media Matter conference, and hope to see you there.