Some insights from 20 years in journalism.
If journalists believe readers don’t care about places like Congo, they’re not going to cover it. But if outlets don’t write about places that are “hard” to cover, then readers will never have a chance to learn about the fascinating intricacies and the beautiful, and painful, lives people around the world live. If they did, it would (hopefully) create more reader interest in hearing such stories, which would cause media outlets to spend more money and devote more room to publishing them.
In the meantime, we’re stuck in an ouroboros in which the media is eating its own tail — to the detriment of not just the people we’re not covering, but to the readers who never get to hear those people’s stories and learn what is going on in huge parts of the world.
