ABSTRACT
This chapter acts as conclusion to the book. It deduces that despite the disruption caused by social media and user-generated content, the relationship between journalists and aid agencies remains close and symbiotic, with the budget cuts and the increasing professionalisation of aid agency press offices helping to facilitate this. It notes increasingly journalists who moved back and forth between journalist and aid agency spaces, blurring the boundaries between the two.
It considers that to deal with the challenges of social media and UGC, both journalists and aid agencies had sought to control these potential disruptors. Various methods were used by media organisations—cloning the tropes of social media by changing reporting styles; segregating it to one part of a media website, or co-opting it as another ‘source’ rather than a challenge to journalism. Meanwhile aid agencies’ early attempts to interact with beneficiaries via UGC and social media had foundered, with many returning to traditional media approaches to ensure that the agency remained ‘on message’.
The chapter suggests action needs to be taken about the ‘virtual doorstep’—the pressure that many UGC creators came under at times of disasters with journalists contacting them online without normal ethical considerations they use face to face.
The chapter looks at whether social media and UGC can overcome the problem of distant suffering, concluding that while audiences react positively such content, it is often a simulated closeness, with the voices of survivors and beneficiaries still being mediated and mediatised through the lens of journalists or aid agencies.
