Of Wetbutt, Sports Journalism and the Future of Communications

In Clay Shirky's seminal 2010 essay “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable” (the “unthinkable” being a world without newspapers—something not so unthinkable anymore), he wrote about the time in 1993 when the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain investigated the online piracy of a popular humour column.

They discovered the pirate was a teen in the Midwest who loved the column, and wanted to share them with others online.

Shirky quoted a newspaper editor who said of that experience: “When a 14 year-old kid can blow up your business in his spare time, not because he hates you but because he loves you, then you got a problem.”

That experience reported by Shirky came to mind for me after reading a column by Winnipeg Free Press sports reporter Paul Wiecek.

In the column, Wiecek wrote about how one of the biggest scoops of the 2017 Major League Baseball season (a trade between the Chicago Cubs and White Sox) came not from the traditional media, but from two members of Reddit.

“It was as close to a clean kill as you can get in the reporting business these days,” Wiecek wrote.

“A stunning trade that came out of the blue, with huge implications for both teams, and no one had even a sniff of it until two users on a subreddit devoted to White Sox gossip broke the story.”

Who was this intrepid reporting tandem? Reddit users KatyPerrysBootyHole and Wetbutt23.

As Wiecek wrote: “You can’t make this stuff up.”

When the Cubs President of Baseball Operations was asked a day after the trade whether he had any other big trades up his sleeve, he replied: "Ask Wetbutt."

“Welcome to 2017,” Wiecek wrote, where huge corporations like baseball teams can be scooped by social media users named  KatyPerrysBootyHole and Wetbutt23.

It’s a world, he wrote where “it’s not just that the old rules of sports journalism don’t apply—it’s that there aren’t any rules in the first place.”

While sports has always had "a guy who knows a guy whose brother is the assistant trainer," he added, “the game-changer in recent years was the evolution of the internet and the megaphone that it provided via social media.”

Now, that same guy “has a platform to distribute his information that is at least as powerful as the Fox Sports portal.”

For sports teams, which employ armies of PR and media relations people to control the message, and the media itself, which has seen itself as the main conduit of information about sport and most anything else in the world, this is now become an issue of “trying to control the uncontrollable.”

What does this mean for non-profits?

Unlike major league sports teams and corporations, we don’t have the resources to try to control the message (not that it is even possible these days).

Like the Chicago Cubs and Whitesox, we are just as susceptible to seeing news about our programs broken by people on social media (but hopefully with better monikers).

For international NGOs, this means that programs done far away are not so far away that someone can’t post a photo or post a comment about it—whether that’s a visitor or a local person.

This is a change from the past, when it was impossible for donors and others to learn anything about our work, unless we reported it—the costs, in terms of travel and access on the ground—were just too high for the average person.

But now anyone with a cell phone could share his or her observations with the world about a feeding program or development project—both good, and bad.

For domestic non-profits, this has been an issue for a longer time, if not forever. Someone unhappy with their meal at the homeless mission or service at the shelter could always go to the media.

The challenge always was to get the media’s attention, or hope the media had enough resources to want to tell the story.

Now those constraints are gone. Think the meal at the mission is slop? Up goes a photo and maybe it goes viral.

As Wiecek said, it is “trying to control the uncontrollable.”

When the “uncontrollable” is positive, it works in our favour. When it isn’t, well . . . that’s a problem.

Whatever it is, we are losing—maybe we have already lost—the ability to control the message. (Whether that was entirely a good thing is a debatable point.)

The question then is: How to respond? When the Wetbutts of the world have as much power and reach as the mainstream media (or more among the younger demographic), how do we communicate about our work and the people we serve?

I don’t have all the answers. Over the next few months, together with a colleague, I hope to find some ideas that might work. 

Or maybe just more questions.

What Can the Media Learn From Churches?

What can newsrooms learn from churches?

If there ever was a title that was made for this Faith Page columnist and media junkie, that is it.

It appeared on an article by by Benjamin Mullin on the Poynter Institute earlier this month.

(It also reminded me of my earlier post about what the mainstream media might learn from church publications.)

In the article, Mullin notes that prior to the Internet and social media, the media didn’t need to innovate. Profits were strong and steady, so why change?

Today, however, the traditional business model for legacy media “has been gutted.” 

Advertising has declined precipitously, and circulation, viewers and listeners are decreasing across the board.

In response, the media has been casting around for an answer. The problem is, Mullin says, they keep asking each other how to get out of the fix they’re in. 

Problem is, none of them have an answer, either.

So what if instead of seeking answers in the same old places, the media looked elsewhere—like to churches and other membership organizations?

That’s what New York University professor Jay Rosen says they need to do.

“In the news industry, it's very common for managers, when confronted with something different, to say: ‘Who else is doing this?’” Rosen said. 

“But what they mean by ‘who else is doing this’ is, ‘who else in news?’ And, more specifically, ‘who else in our category?’

“They tend to look horizontally at their own kind.”

What they should do, he suggests, is look to churches, orchestras, activist organizations — to groups that have managed to build and keep devoted, paying followings.

To learn more, Rosen created that the Membership Puzzle Project, a collaboration between the Dutch journalism platform de Correspondent and New York University. 

The aim of the project is to “gather knowledge about the most important question for the future of high quality, public-service journalism: How do we build a sustainable news organization that restores trust in journalism and moves readers to become paying members of an online community?”

Or, to put it another way, the Project wants to find out what makes membership programs successful.

Based on the success of de Correspondent, Rosen believes the membership model holds a lot of promise for news organizations.

And what is he learning so far?

Again, based on what’s happening at de Correspondent, he believes a key to success is for everyone in the newsroom to accept the principle of connecting with members and engaging with people as knowledgeable readers.

He also thinks it is important for the media to customers, but as people who are engaged in the creation of the news.

When people are engaged with journalism and they feel a part of it, a “strong bond” is created between members and journalists, he says.

At de Correspondent, a way this happens is that reporters are required to do weekly emails that explain what they're working on and the knowledge needs they have.

“They ask for help from the membership,” Rosen says. “And so they're constantly drawing information — knowledge, tips, contacts, links — from the members . . . they treat the members not just as financial supporters, but as a knowledge community.

What he’s trying to figure out is how to create “a more muscular notion of membership than simply, ‘Donate money to support this site?’ That has become our headlight observation.”

To come up with is more “muscular” model, Rosen intends to research a variety of membership organizations. Churches are of particular interest.

Reflecting on the Project, part of me wants to warn Rosen—churches aren’t doing as well as he thinks. Like the media, and every other group or organization, they are challenged by a greying and shrinking audience.

But I applaud him for looking beyond the usual places for answers. This is something I think all groups, organizations, faith groups, and the media should do.

What if we got the leaders from all those different groups in a room and invited them to work at the common challenges together? What kind of wisdom might arise?

Who knows—maybe the answer might be found in the place that is least suspected and expected.

And if it can’t be found—if there truly is no new model to replace all the models the Internet broke, to paraphrase Clay Shirky—then at least, at the end of the day, we can say we tried our best.  

Cut the Jargon, and Other Tips for Sharing About International Development with the Public

The way most NGOs speak about the topic a “foreign language” to most people

“The public needs the bigger picture for aid to survive.”

That was the headline for an article on the website of Bond, an organization in Great Britain that works on behalf of international NGOs.

Written in June after that country’s general election, author Melissa Paramasivan said that British NGOs “should consider themselves lucky that their budget battleground wasn’t bloodier.”

Despite concerns that aid might be cut, “most parties pledged to keep the UK’s commitment 0.7% of GDP to aid,” she wrote.

But that doesn’t mean NGOs can rest, she added; aid has become a target for politicians, the media and those who call for more money to be spent at home—where an estimated 1.1 million Britons use food banks.

If NGOs want to preserve aid funding, then they need to help the public understand what the money is spent on—they need to do better communications, Paramasivan stated.

Unlike health, education or transport, “aid is not a service that you see or experience every day in the UK,” she wrote.

“This means communicators should be working even harder to tell us what the budget is being used for and how it relates to the wider work of the government, and the world.”

NGO communicators need to do the same thing as any other marketer: “Convince people that what you’re selling is worth parting money for.”

Currently, she went on, NGOs are doing a very poor job at that.

NGO communications tends to consist of “quarterly reports, riddled with jargon, written for a target audience already working in the sector, generally indigestible to the general public.”

It needs to change, she added, “otherwise the funding will.”

One way to do this is social media. But many NGOs aim their social media messages at specialists, not the generalists—the public, the people the politicians listen to.

“To borrow from business, aid used to be a Business to Business (B2B) model,” she wrote, noting how aid groups used to think all they needed to do was get money from the government and then report to them how they spent it.

But now, she said, “it’s a Business to Consumer model (B2C) driven by the growth of digital and social media. The public has an ever-increasing influence on how money is spent, especially when aid is brought into election campaigns.”

Now aid groups need to not just report back to government how they spent their money, but also to the public who makes that expenditure possible, she says.

So, what’s the solution for those who fear aid cuts? “Cut the jargon and stop underestimating people,” Paramasivan says.

International Development is a complex concept, she acknowledges. But the way most NGOs talk about it, “it’s a foreign language” for most people—and it doesn’t help that most of the discussion takes place in lecture halls and insider meetings, conferences and roundtables.

Communicators, she says, “need to share stories in easy-to-find arenas and with accessible messaging.”

She is quick to note that she isn’t advocating dumbing things down; “people understand a lot more than you think,” she stataes. “They just need to see where it fits into the bigger picture.”

Her suggestions for breaking “the cycle of introverted communications? Get practical. Invest in communications; it’s as important as monitoring and evaluation.”

“Strip back the jargon when pitching to journalists. There is every chance your story fits the global news agenda, don’t package it as ‘development news.’”

“Think about it as a conversation in the pub—you are telling an interesting topical story to a general audience. Leave the jargon for conferences.”

Use Facebook live, hackathons, twitter chat; “there are more and more ways to reach people than press releases.”

And don’t be surprised when your case study gets three likes, she says. Groups need to ask: Why should anyone read this story? How are we leading people to it? What’s their experience when they get there?

Sounds like good advice to me.

For more on this, see my post “When it Comes to International Development, Are We Nuts?” about the one question that NGOs may need to answer  above all others.

Megatrends for NGO Fundraisers, Marketers and Communicators

In April I organized a workshop with Christopher Bosch, Director of Strategy and Operations for World Vision. 

Through his work, Chris researches trends affecting that agency, and other church-related NGOs.

During the workshop, Chris spoke about megatrends affecting people who do fundraising, marketing and communications in the international relief and development sector.

Chris defined a megatrend as a “large-scale recognizable change to accepted norms or assumptions about how people organizations or governments will behave in the future.”

He went on to identify some megatrends NGOs need to be aware of.

The Philanthropy Environment Has Changed

World Vision has discovered it is more expensive to acquire a donor than before, and they leave more quickly.

These new donors are less attracted to long-term pledge-style giving. such as child sponsorship. 

At World Vision, support for child sponsorship—it’s hallmark product—is declining. People are no longer willing to make 3-5 year commitments.

New donors consider a donation an investment, and they want to see results.

They want to participate, not just donate. They hate it when someone says “trust us—we are the experts.” They want to be involved. We need to invite them into the discussion about how and what we do.

World Vision’s research into donors also shows that these new donors aren’t seeking a long-term relationship with a charity. The older cohort of donors want to "marry" a charity—be donors for life. 

But the new givers are more interested in a one-night stand: Give once this year, maybe next year. But no commitments beyond that.

Poverty Message Isn’t Connecting

Canadian NGOs talk a lot about poverty and helping the poor. But maybe that message doesn’t work anymore, Chris said. People have heard it forever, and maybe growing tired of it.

Chris suggested we might have more success talking about resiliency—the ability to withstand shocks and bounce back from disaster.

He said that people might understand this better than poverty, since the new generation of donors, unlike the older ones, have never experienced poverty or hardship. (e.g. the Great Depression.)

Although they can’t relate to poverty, these donors can relate to vulnerability, and the need for outside help to overcome challenges or disasters—things like the Fort McMurray wildfires, flooding or storms in various parts of the country, or just a personal loss.

Helping someone come back from a disaster, or being equipped to better withstand a shock, is more relatable than talking about poverty, Chris said. 

He asked: Should we brand ourselves as vulnerability reduction agencies, rather than anti-poverty organizations?

A Blending of Non-Profit and For-Profit Efforts is on the Rise

Chris indicated that a social enterprise approach to development is on the rise—corporations seeking to make a profit while helping the poor. 

NGOs could partner with businesses to help them do this well, maybe even take an equity stake in the enterprise.

He went on to say that corporate donors have two pockets. We mostly reach into charitable, or foundation, pocket. But that is becoming emptier. What about reaching into the one that is full—investment portfolios?

NGOs have not asked businesses to channel their investments into our work to get a return. This could be attractive to businesses, high net worth individuals, mutual funds, and insurance companies that want to do good in a business-like way.

Disruption & Disintermediation

He noted how new businesses like Arbnb, Uber, Amazon, Etsy, Crowdfunding have disrupted traditional businesses. Their genius is to bypass traditional ways of doing business by connecting people who want to supply something with people who need it (disintermediation).

NGOs are not safe from this kind of disruption and disintermediation. They can also be leaped over. The day is coming when people in Canada can connect directly to NGOs in the south—they won’t need us. Someone in Kenya with a smartphone could launch a crowdfunder to raise $1,000 for an enterprise—all he needs is 100 people giving $10 each.

Already, an organization called GiveDirectly is enabling people to give cash directly to the world’s poorest people. Its vision is to bypass traditional top-down NGOs, with all their costs of doing business, and give money directly to the poor.

Chris noted that NGOs are not universally loved like we used to be. There are some harsh critiques out there, like the book Dead Aid.

Click here to read Are Non-Profits Ready for Disintermediation? 

Other Trends

Other trends Chris noted include how the centre of NGO action is moving south (Oxfam is moving headquarters south.) And western governments are indicating they will require NGOs to have more southern partners for their work.

There is a vibrant southern church, and partners there are developing more expertise and capacity.

And there is more wealth being generated in countries that are middle income. NGOs might be able to raise money there and nourish local fundraising capacities.

At the same time, southern governments are becoming more critical of southern NGOs, wanting to see more western government money given directly to southern NGOs (instead of first passing through Canadian organizations).

Then there is the move to giving cash, instead of physical aid. Many NGOs are not technologically sophisticated to use cards and phones for e-transfers of money, nor have they developed good systems for tracking.

It’s a changing universe, in other words. (And we hardly touched on communications.) 

They may or may not prove 100% accurate, but NGOs (and other charities) ignore them at their peril—better to be planning ahead than caught unprepared.

Report About Communications, Churches and Missions Released: Tell Me a Story

"The challenge is just information overload and then you go numb."

“It takes energy to be connected to all these things.”

That’s what a respondent to a survey about church and missions told Rick Hiemstra of the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada about the challenge of staying up-to-date with all the communication coming from church-related ministries these days.

The respondent went on to compare life today with what it was like before the Internet.

Now, he said, “the circles of concern are increasing and some of these people are just stretched to the limit because there so many issues at all these different levels.”

The response was part of the Canadian Evangelical Missions Engagement Study, sponsored by the EFC and the Canadian Missions Research Forum.

During the study, over 3,400 members of evangelical churches n Canada were polled about their engagement with missions.

In the fourth of a series of five reports from the study, Rick shared results about how people in Canada want to receive communications about missions.

(Another finding of the study was about what has been called the domestification of priorities when it comes to how churches decide what to support—more and more are deciding to keep money at home for important local needs.)

Although the study is about missions, it still provides insights for church-related groups doing relief and development work.

In his report, Rick notes that many respondents “talked about the challenge of managing the volume of communications from missionaries and mission agencies.”

Said one person: “The challenge . . . is just information overload and then you go numb.”

At the same time, many respondents said they wanted information. Yet they “saw a paradox in the demand for information and the common complaint that there was too much information to absorb.”

So what kind of communication do churches and individuals want?

Most commonly, respondents said they expected written communications anywhere from monthly, to twice a year, to annually.

Said one: “I think twice a year is good. If you get too many letters you tend to stop reading them because sometimes they don't have new information and then they all start to sound the same!”

And what do they want to see in the communications? Most said they want two things: Stories of lives changed, and evidence that missionaries have a plan that they are carrying out.

Said one pastor about an agency he thinks is doing a good job of communicating: “They communicate well, a lot of stories . . . but they are also good at saying this is how we are spending our money.”

Said another after noting appreciation for information about what is being done: “At the same time, they’re telling the story where it’s not boring, they’re telling it actually how it’s affected people and what’s going on and what they’ve gained . . . it's not just numbers and facts.”

And how long should communications be? If it is printed and mailed, keep it short.

Said Rick: “Almost all informants said the ideal length for a written report is about two pages and it should be “as basic as possible.”

They went on to say that the “elements they want in a more formal written communication are goals set, goals met, and stories of transformed lives, and they want this in two pages.”

What about social media? Some churches like to be able to have a Skype conversation with a mission worker—it makes it much more personal.

Said one pastor: It's the relationship that's key. Social media is personal and immediate unlike form letters.” Said another: “Skype in the service makes missions extremely personal and much more alive.”

One form of communication that people also appreciate is in-person, which helps authenticate and personalize the need and the person or agency being supported.

Says Rick: “Printed media, on its own, is not sufficient. It needs to be corroborated or authenticated by a person. As quality communications have become easy to produce, people are paralyzed by the volume of information and are looking for ‘real people’ and relationships to help them sort what is important.”

And yet, despite all this, the challenge remains: Even when agencies follow all these guidelines, getting people to pay attention is hard.

As one pastor put it about the lack of pick-up for missions in his church: “I suspect that they are not catching what you are throwing at them because they do not have the resources of time and energy to process it.”

For the complete report, click here.

Canadian International Relief & Development Sector: Ripe for Disruption?

In wake of merger of big cancer charities, what would happen if Canadian NGOs dreamed up a new way to serve the poor?

Earlier this year the Canadian Cancer Society and the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation announced they were merging.

The reason for the merger? Rising fundraising costs and falling donations.

In an interview in the Globe and Mail, Cancer Society chairman Robert Lawrie said  the merger, which is designed to cut costs and promote efficiencies, might be a model for other charities struggling with growing costs and falling donations.

One person who would like to see that happen in Canada’s international relief and development sector is Nicolas Moyer, formerly director of the Humanitarian Coalition.

During his time at the Coalition, which brings together seven Canadian NGOs to collaborate on fundraising efforts during disasters in the developing world, Moyer was a persistent—and often lone—voice promoting increased cooperation in the sector.

Looking at the sector today, with its many competing organizations, he wonders what would happen if the leaders of Canada’s major relief and development NGOs acted like the two cancer charities, setting aside their organizational interests to dream up a new model to serve the poorest and most vulnerable people around the globe.

If they did that, “they would never come up with the system we have today,” Moyer says.

“NGO leaders wouldn’t, in good conscience, choose to set up competing organizations, vying for brand recognition and competing for market share of donor dollars.”

Instead, he says, "they’d find a way to work together, minimize wasteful duplication and maximize our collective impact for the good of the people we want to help.”

One thing that would help spur merger talk would be if the federal government, which provides millions of dollars in grant funding, “stopped feeding sector competition and instead tried to incentivize collaboration.”

The government could, “at little to no cost,” he says, only make grants available to NGOs that work together, providing “dedicated funding streams for joint approaches, or even refuse to consider single-agency programs.”

But even if the government doesn’t force groups to collaborate more, he thinks other forces will compel them to do so.

“The sector is incredibly ripe for disruption,” he states—like what happened through Uber to taxis, AirBnB to hotels, and the Internet to the news media.

Among the disruptions he sees for NGOs include how “developing world governments are getting better at what we do."

And although not every poor country is treating its citizens the way they should, “as more of them attend to the needs of their citizens, what will be the role for foreign NGOs?” he asks.

Then there’s the arrival of groups like Give Directly, which cut out the NGO “broker” and enable Canadians to give directly to poor people in the developing world.

“At some point, an enterprising person or group in the developing world is going to figure that out they no longer need western NGOs to mediate between donors and the poor,” he says. “When that happens, what will our role be?”

And even if the current model isn’t disrupted, there’s the challenge of raising funds to keep all these agencies going.

“Despite all the money that goes into competing NGO fundraising and marketing campaigns, as a whole the sector is not raising more money for relief and development,” he says. 

And even though agencies are spending more to fundraise, “overall giving for relief and development in Canada hasn’t grown,” he adds. “All we are doing is winning or losing market share from each other.”

For Moyer, the big question is: “Can we work together to be more efficient?” He isn’t optimistic.

“While a few NGOs are looking at the big challenges ahead, most in the sector are ignoring the serious structural issues underlying their future,” he says.

NGOs, he states, should be asking themselves: “Where do we want to be 20-30 years from now? If the current way we are operating isn’t sustainable, what would we replace it with? If we worked together more, what could we collectively achieve?”

Disruption is a fact of life today. Is merger an answer? Not everyone will agree with Moyer's view that it is. But at least he is asking important questions.

A version of this post was originally published in the May 10, 2017 Hill Times.

The Media and International Disasters, or Don't Hold Your Famine During the Olympics

When it comes to the media, 45 times more Africans have to die than Europeans to get the same kind of coverage.

Children line up for food in South Sudan.

Some black humour from the world of relief and development: “If you are planning a famine, don’t hold it in summer—we’re on vacation then. Also, avoid U.S. election years.”

That old and sad “joke” we used to tell ourselves years ago to explain why some disasters got covered, and others didn't, came back to me as I thought about the lack of attention being paid to the terrible hunger crisis today in parts of Africa and Yemen.

An estimated 20 million people face starvation in South Sudan, Somalia, Yemen and parts of Kenya and Nigeria—the largest humanitarian crisis since 1945 according to the UN.

And yet, although the world has known about the situation for months, there has been hardly any news about it in the media.

Sure, there’s been a bit of coverage here and there—the CBC did a fine job in early May. But in general, there has been mostly silence in newspapers, radio or TV.

Why is this the case? I can think of a number of reasons.

First, it’s hard for journalists to get into the most-devastated areas—even NGOs have trouble getting food to those who need it most.

Second, media outlets also have fewer resources and staff to cover stories. Even if they wanted to cover it, it would be hard to find the funds.

Third, it’s hard to tell the story of a famine, which takes months to develop. Unlike a hurricane or earthquake, there are no great pictures to show as the tragedy slowly unfolds.

Fourth there’s the Trump effect; the new President, and his unpredictable ways, has sucked up much of the media oxygen. Throw in all the other news competing for attention, and time for the famine can be hard to find.

Finally, there’s the general fatigue everyone feels over the extended Syria crisis. We hardly have space in our hearts for another disaster. And the media isn’t stupid; they can count the clicks on their websites. They know what people are reading—or not.

What disasters get covered by the media and which don’t was the subject of a 2007 study of major U.S. TV network news by Thomas Eisensee and David Stromberg.

Titled “News, Droughts, Floods, and U.S. Disaster Relief,” and published in the May, 2007 issue Quarterly Journal of Economics, the study looked at 5,000 natural disasters between 1968 and 2002 that affected 125 million people—and how they were covered by ABC, CBC, NBC and CNN.

The study found that coverage was affected by whether the disaster occurs at the same time as other newsworthy events, such as the Olympic Games, along with where it happened and how many people died.

(This certainly was true during the 2012 Sahel food crisis, which took place at the same time as the London Olympics; the media dedicated most of its reporters to the games, and the events took up most of the space and time.)

The authors found that while the media cover around 30 percent of the earthquakes and volcanic disasters, less than five percent of droughts and food shortages are covered—despite many more people dying due to droughts and food shortages.

They even came up with a numerical comparison: For every one or two people who dies in an earthquake or volcano, 32,920 people must die of food shortage to receive the same media coverage.

The study also revealed geographical bias, showing that it 45 times more Africans have to die in a disaster than Europeans to get the same kind of media coverage.

(These findings echo the old 1960s “Racial Equivalence Scale” created by American reporters to show the minimum number of people who had to die in plane crashes in different countries, compared to the U.S., before there was coverage. According to the scale, “one hundred Czechs were equal to 43 Frenchmen, and the Paraguayans were at the bottom.”)

While media coverage of disasters in the developing world is sporadic, one thing it can do is spur government action: “We conclude that media coverage induces extra U.S. relief to victims in Europe and on the American continent, at the expense of victims elsewhere,” the authors state.

This makes the role of the media doubly important; depending on what they choose to focus on, people may live or die as governments respond by providing aid.

But what does this mean for today, when the media is greatly diminished by falling circulation and fewer viewers and listeners?

Unlike during the period of the study, the media has less impact. It may reach fewer of the public, but the government still pays attention.

If elected officials see something in the news often enough, they will conclude that their constituents also care about it—otherwise, why so much coverage? 

Media reports can then spur the government to action, by doing things like offering to match donations by Canadians who want to respond to the disaster.

At a time when the media is trying to convince people about its importance, helping to save the lives of millions of people dying of hunger is a pretty good case to make.

For more on this topic, and the role media consumers play in the amount of media coverage we get, see When it Comes to Media Coverage of Drowned Refugees or Dead Gorillas, We Have Met the Enemy and He is Us.