ABSTRACT

In 2010, Save the Children UK ran its blogladesh campaign, organizing a media trip to Bangladesh to raise awareness of the Millennium Development Goals. Save the Children UK had recently appointed Liz Scarff as its first digital media manager and tasked her with finding innovative ways of using social media to promote Save’s profile and campaigns. This chapter suggests that blogladesh challenged the boundaries of reporting humanitarian crises. The Cake Campaign saw both aid agencies exploring other ways to reach the public with humanitarian stories, while journalists themselves started to adopt the influence of the subjective in humanitarian reporting, as had happened in other areas of journalism. Blogladesh fulfills this definition of a critical incident because not only journalists but also their traditional source for humanitarian stories was affected by the way new entrants to the journalistic field and key aspects of boundary work came to the fore.