ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we investigate the unique professional practices of humanitarian journalists. We find that they take advantage of the relative freedom provided by their seemingly liminal status – at a boundary zone between fields – to experiment with alternative ways of performing the role of both a journalist and a humanitarian. They rejected various conventional journalistic practices – including the news values of ‘cultural proximity’ and ‘immediacy’ and the sourcing practices of ‘humanisation’ and a ‘hierarchy of credibility’. Instead, they favour hybrid practices that are neither entirely journalistic nor humanitarian but that, ‘must be seen as native to the interface between the two’. These include reporting under-reported crises, adding value to existing coverage and amplifying marginalised voices. We also show that these unique news values and sourcing practices directly shape the content they produce.
