ABSTRACT
Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) perform a range of important information tasks, many of which increasingly overlap with the work of journalists. This chapter focuses on author's research of two leading human rights NGOs Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch to argue that NGOs have expanded journalism's boundaries and that this development is driven largely by a desire among NGOs to achieve legitimacy among political elites. It argues that NGOs can be understood to expand the boundaries of journalism in that they provide diverse information about various parts of the world in a range of accessible formats, both for news organizations and for their own organizational purposes. It contends that what drives this expansion has little to do with journalism itself but resulted instead from a professionalization strategy by NGOs seeking legitimacy vis-a-vis political elites. The chapter discusses NGOs as journalistic entities within existing scholarship on NGOs and journalism.
